Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS

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Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS

A year ago I was really interested in seeing the community aspect of the OpenStreetMap website improve, and the recent update to Rails brought a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, with space to be tweaked and improved upon. Since I started to learn Ruby on Rails recently, what better way was there to help, but build on the functionality that others have put in already.

I outlined some ideas on the wiki and decided that some of my first priorities would be adding RSS to the diaries, making them easier to post to, improving the user profiles and also the messaging interface. I've added a few small changes over the past few days, but today saw the release of the biggest one so far: an RSS feed for all diary entries, so you can now subscribe to updates of everyone mapping on OpenStreetMap. Over time I'm also hoping to add other feeds for individual diaries, for your friends and also for those mapping nearby.

If you haven't used OpenStreetMap's diary feature, now is the time to give it a try and let people know what you're working on mapping at the moment. Right now, you can post to it by viewing your own diary (through your account page) and clicking on 'new post', but I'll be looking to make it easier for users to post as well.

Update: looks like it needs a little tweaking still, but the basics are there.

Posted in Geographic, Web at 10:06 AM on Tuesday 12 June 2007
Tags: OpenStreetMap Ruby on Rails

Comments

Looks great - what about adding GeoRSS support for appropriate entries? Such as ones about mapping parties - entire countries (bbox or polygon?) Seems complex, but a centroid of Italy isn't sufficient either - maybe using the geonames namespace)

Posted by: Andrew Turner at June 12, 2007 9:47 PM

Geotagging of posts is on the books, though I was planning just to add a simple point per entry. You have a good point and I know in some situations a bounding box may suit better but I suspect a lot of people will use the diary as a place where they write about their recent activities in an area, which is likely to be relatively small.

I think to start I'd probably just stick with a point, partly because it'd make the processing simpler :)

Posted by: Dan Karran at June 12, 2007 10:05 PM