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mguentner / octolayer

an openlayers map plugin for octopress
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Make work with .gpx files #1

Open throughnothing opened 12 years ago

throughnothing commented 12 years ago

I'm interested in extending your plugin to accept .gpx files and display entire .gpx tracks on the map. I'm not that familiar with openlayers API, so I wanted to get your thoughts on this before I dive in.

When I travel, I often record my routes and stuff with a small GPS, and would like to show my route for the day along with a blog post for that day. I already keep a github repository with my gpx files, so it would be great to do something like: 

{% map "http://raw.github.com/throughnothing/gpx/file.gpx" %}

Or maybe a different keyword like {% map_gpx ... %} or something.

Thoughts?

mguentner commented 12 years ago

Hey,

I really like the idea of having gpx support in OctoLayer. The process should be pretty simple, since OpenLayers already supports loading .gpx files through http. It also would be nice to have some kind of POI support together with .gpx files for interesting places you have visited that day (bars, vantage points etc.) and want to provide more information (comments, links etc.) on them.

One way could be through waypoints (<wpt></wpt>), which are defined in the gpx standard - but you need a special editor (like Google Earth) to insert them into the gpx file or enter the XML by hand, which sucks. Another way is to use a plain text file, containing all the POI you want to display on a map. You can find an example of such a map at

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/markers.html which uses this text file for (some of) the markers: http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/textfile.txt

I guess this is the more intuitive way of handling POI. What do you think of using the keyword/syntax {% track "http://raw.github.com/throughnothing/gpx/file.gpx" "http://raw.github.com/throughnothing/gpx/poi.txt" %} with the POI file (last argument) being optional?

Max

throughnothing commented 12 years ago

@mguentner I like all of your suggestions :)

The POI.txt would be perfect. Something else that I do, to add to this discussion is that I geotag my photos for the day. I'm gonna look into if we can get some sort of poi or waypoint data from flickr from a certain account for a certain day, and then we could actually pull in geotag data from flickr and show the photos from the day on the map right where they were taken. Not sure how exactly flickr exposes this data, but that would be really useful.

throughnothing commented 12 years ago

@mguentner I had a chance to set up your plugin and try it out. I can't find the openlayers documentation on loading .gpx files...can you point me in the right direction? I've not used openlayers before. Thanks.

mguentner commented 12 years ago

This should get you started:

coreyp commented 10 years ago

Did anyone ever implement the .gpx or .txt solution?

mguentner commented 10 years ago

@coreyp As far as I know, no. But feel free to contribute a solution. You can also check out jekyll-mapping which seems to offer some gpx/kml functionality.

Hope that helps.

throughnothing commented 10 years ago

I've also improved the jekyll-mapping support for GPX files a little bit here:

https://github.com/throughnothing/jekyll-mapping