Props to Veloroutes

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on September 8, 2008 • google maps: • COMMENT

Finally I have a bike ride good enough for veloroutes.org. 159.1 miles through the Adirondacks in the blazing sun!

Veloroutes is constantly being updated with new features, not to mention all the bike routes everyone’s been submitting so it’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. Little ol’ Lancaster, PA, even has over 40 routes.

My favorite feature still has to be the elevation profile it provides along with all the calculated data — total distance, total gain, max % grade, etc.

Check out the first hill we walked biked up.



KML Mashup Experiment

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 24, 2008 • google maps: • COMMENT

Here’s a KML experiment I did over the weekend — annual precipitation of California, 1961-1990.

Some tweaking and headaches involved but I’m satisfied with the result. Rule #1 as a cartographer is to make every map created here look pretty.

The data was originally for the entire U.S. which bloated into a 22 MB kml file. Rather than simplifying and sacrificing such good data, I clipped out California. The kml is currently at 2.4 MB and still loads a bit slow but at least I now have a better understanding of how well Google Maps handles data.

(Not great, though it sure looks nice!)