I was incredibly fortunate to be able to attend Open Data Day* last week in Christchurch.
While there, the very awesome @kayakr (Jonathan Hunt) gave an unconference session on how to build APIs from static webpages**.
After some playing around with a table I got from the Wellington City Council of inland offleash dog areas, I realised that there was something I’d rather use: Mapbox.
[TileMill is awesome, and made by Mapbox, but I wanted moar]
And so, here’s my first bash: I’ve called it ‘dogs ‘n kids‘.
It’s a melange of three different datasets:
- yellow: playgrounds in Wellington
- orange: dog exercise areas (2009), and
- orange: the aforementioned dataset I cobbled together, with some manual frootling, from the WCC page.
This is Fun. It’s also turtles all the way down. Huzzah!
And if a rampant n00b such as myself can do it, so can you. Get out there and play :)
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Update: Here’s one I made for the Porirua City region. Entitled ‘Fambly stuff - Porirua’, it shows dog areas (orange), playgrounds (yellow) and walking tracks (blue).
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I’ve been learning a lot about accessibility recently, and now I think about it with everything I do. I have NO idea how maps like this are for accessibility, but I’m thinking Not Great. Tomorrow, I will be asking some amazingly cool people about this. Stay tuned for updates.
* Keep an eye on the Web Toolkit blog for upcoming posts about ODD and APIs and such goodness.
** Basically - use the kimonolabs plugin, then the GeoJSON tool for Google spreadsheets, followed by importing everything into TileMill. Voila***.
*** Frootling may be required. This is Normal and probably Required. If you don’t want to make your own datasets, check out data.govt.nz and koordinates.