maps

I'm starting a 3 month bike trip next week and would love to build a detailed map of the whole 90 day ride, but my map stops taking points at about number 15 (that's only day 2)...am I doing something incorrectly, or can you build the option to dramatically increase the number of waypoints? The idea is to show the route, not to post a blog about every town I pass through.

What would be really cool is to have an option to load kml files from google earth. Then you can build your routes in google earth (where you have panning functionality to understand topography...which is nice on a bicycle).

I appreciate your thoughts.

written by

roel krabbendam on December 11, 2006

Thanks for the feedback. I've never been too happy with the way Google Maps (which we're using for our mapping) handles large numbers of points. It tends to bog down something fierce. I think you might be the first user to really try to stress test the trip builder. I gave it a quick test with 50 waypoints, and it seems to be working OK:

http://www.blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?tripID=397

Did it actually give you an error, or did it simply bring your browser to a crawl after 15 points? Could you tell me which browser you were using when it happened?

I've been meaning to do KML import/export for a while now. It would definately be nice to be able to view your route in Google Earth when you're on your own machine.

Anyway, if the trip builder keeps giving you grief, let me know. I'm afraid you might need to scale back a bit on the detail though. 45 places/day * 90 days might just be too many little Orange lines for IE to render at once.

Good luck with the ride!

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on December 11, 2006

Jason:
thanks for the quick reply. turns out the number of points isn't a problem. occasionally, one of the placxenames on your map generates an error when i try to add it to my itinerary. if i skip over that location and go to the next one, it turns out to work just fine.

For example, the town of Bi'r Ali Ben Khalifah, Tunisia (at the intersection of roads P2 and P14), generates an error message. I assumed I had reached some kind of file size limit, which is why I sent you a message, but that proves not to be the case. I ran into a couple more of these as I mapped my route, but neglected to note them (sorry)

I've now mapped my route all the way down into Niger, and will finish up with Benin today: all in all, its working pretty well.

as long as i'm whinging, I also noted another issue that I can't quite get my head around. Takrunah, Tunisia accidently ended up on my itinerary twice, but I can't seem to erase it. Every time I erase and resave, it ends up "un-erased". For now I'm just leaving it on my itinery twice, and no harm done, but its another little brain-teaser to keep you off the streets and securely employed.

Cheers, Roel

written by

roel krabbendam on December 11, 2006

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Heading South?