ChristianK

Yet another bussy year is drawing to a close…

,

Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

Another year is drawing to a close, already the 9th year for OAM !
Nine years are a long time in an era in which continous and accelerating change is the only constant.

Without my ally Tobias and Michal and the Members of the OAM Developer-Community OpenAndroMaps wouldn’t be what it is today – probably the best vector maps for all outdoor fanatics and travellers.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

A short summary of the innovations that have been incorporated into the OAM in 2020:

  • offline POIs for Locus
  • 10m contourlines for most maps
  • better representation and resolving of country and state borders
  • name-labels adapted to curved ways, an essential inovation
  • the overview/general maps by Michael have been completely reworked, he also created the new map coverage pictures in the download area
  • webservers moved to a cloud-server at Hetzner.de

Investments were also made in the equipment of the rendering machine:

  • The system SSD was changed after 9 years
    At the beginning of the year 2 SSD’s were purchased just for file caching,
    1* Samsung 970PRO 1TB PCI,
    1* Samsung 850PRO 500GB
  • An own graphics card to free another 2GB of RAM for rendering

 

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!
Tobias, Michael, Christian

/3 Comments/by
ChristianK

Back to the old Forum-Plugin

The new version of the forum plugin
= BBPress 2.6.5 unfortunately sufferes from some problems.

Posts not created by moderators were set to “Hold” if they contained several links or even (oh well, imagine!!) media. WITHOUT message to the moderators.
Furthermore BBPress is not able to set the date/time stamp of the last post in the forum overview correctly since 5 months.

Thanks to Frank from the Netherlands for his endless patience in detecting errors!

So back to BBPress Version 2.5.14

As far as I can see, everything is working fine – if you have any problems with the downgrade please let me know.
If you can’t do otherwise, please leave a comment here.

By the way, the update of _all_ the maps is in progress with further improved LoPoI’s which are now also directly included in the map_zip.

 

Best regards
Christian

/by
ChristianK

Spring cleaning of the OAM website

Dear OAM community,

The website of the OpenAndroMaps will be dusted a little bit in the next days (it’s raining 😉 ).
A tedious and time-consuming work, but, especially with WordPress, it is inevitable from time to time.

Why:

We have now PHP +7 / MySql 5.7 on the server side and not every WordPress plugin can do that.
Which means that old plugins that have not been maintained for years have to be eliminated or replaced.
Only when this is done WP and the theme itself are able to be updated.
Unfortunately, the plugin that generates the dynamic download tables is also one of these deliverables – finding a replacement here will be a challenge.
If someone has experience with the FOO-Tables under WP+5 (doesn’t work or what has to be done) I would be grateful for any help.

For now, the SocialMedia plugin (Shariff) has been eliminated and replaced by the function that is now integrated into the Enfold theme. There is _no_ communication with FB/Twitter/Instgramm/etc – only a “stupid” link is set. This corresponds to my idea of a clean website.

Another, very practical plugin, is/was the CrayonSyntaxHighlighter for source codes that are formatted very nicely and readably. Unfortunately this plugin has not been updated for 4 years and there is no adequate replacement that would be worth the program overhead. So these elements (program snippets in the majority) are now displayed as PRE-formatted text.

And so on, the list is quite long…

What does this mean for you:

I have to replace some elements on all pages and then check ALL pages and posts for consistency. Furthermore all caches+CDN have to be switched off from time to time.
Which means that the website will be (sometimes) very, very slow – this can’t be avoided because the WordPress Backend (Admin) consumes a lot of resources.
So if you see a “Gateway Error No [something]” please understand a webmaster who is trying to keep his inner center while restarting the server.

Best regards
Christian

In the meantime you can download Michael’s maps to your smartphone, they have reached a level of perfection that will amaze you:

World Maps
/0 Comments/by
ChristianK

Yet another year is drawing to a close…

, ,

Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

another year is drawing to a close, already the sixth year for OAM.

Time to say “thanks” to all the people contibuting new, better Data for OAM like
@Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
@MaxBe who found a way to sort mountain peaks by “importance” so we could render the important ones in lower zoom-levels – an improvement that is included in the december map update.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!

/by
ChristianK

Was have happened at OAM till Nov 2017?

,

Yes, I know..

Kommunikation from my side to the OpenAndroMaps community could – and should – be better (by far) 😉

A lot of improvements happened during 2017  – OAM is’nt on idle at all, we are working hard to improve, add new Features, include external Data, aso..

Here a small overview about improvements so far in 2017:

Maps:

  • Abbreviations for Street / Place names in many languages for more reliable rendering (eg Street / Strasse > St.)
  • Better rendering of cycletracks and lanes along roads
  • Put_in / regress / portage_ways for paddlers included in map_data
  • @Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
  • @Tobias constantly improves the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.
  • Constant evolution of the multilanguage maps > now (eg) PidginChines works reliable
  • Better redering of access rights and road surfaces
  • Difficult scale (sac_scale) for mountain paths without restrictions
  • Names for Islands / Archipelagos now render much better and at lower zoom levels – appearence is driven by calculated size of area covered
  • @Michael works for a better set of GeneralMaps
  • …

Website:

  • Server moved to new, more reliable provider with up to date infrastructure
  • Protokoll moved to HTTPS
  • New version of WordPress theme with much better apperance and faster rendering on mobile devices
  • aso..

 

However the best of all is about to come.
December update will bring a real great improvement for hikers and alpinists.

 

Best regards
Team of OAM

/0 Comments/by
ChristianK

[done] OpenAndroMaps website switches to HTTPS/SSL this week

, ,

The OpenAndroMaps website will switch to secure transfer protocoll  according HTTPS / SSL this week.

This step is required by the Google guidlines to provide the HTTPS / SSL for all sites that require user inputs such as comments, user accounts, or forums.
This is an important step ahead in data security, which has been supported on the side of OpenAndroMaps since long by flanking, server-side actions like Intruderdedection, protection against BruteForce attacks and integration into various blacklists.

 

UPDATE 2017-08-22 18:00h MEZ: Done, the Website is running on fine on SSL, no mixed contend any more – we have a green lock-symbol on all pages. I  have tested all functions and have’nt found any bug. However, if you experience problems please post here as comment or in the forum.

Best regards, Christian

/2 Comments/by
ChristianK

Website Maintenance from 1st of Mai on

Major maintenance works have to be done on OpenAndroMaps.org

Usually this is no big deal – you are right 😉

However, OpenAndroMaps is a multilingual website an some plugins (like the Forum!) are not made for multilingual use and even WPML doesn’t support BBPress at all. So these plugins have to be customized again once an update is inevitable.

Another critical factor is the spam and splogger protection of the forum. The plugin I used so far was Wangguard – this service has finally stopped its service without prior notice. So an other spamprotection have to take place and this have to be testet in brief cause this usually will effect user registration of the (customized) BBPress forum plugin.

I will try to make these maintenance as painless as ever possible for you and will perform all tasks on a test environment first.

However, maybe there will be a few issues left.
I would kindly ask you that, if you come across any issue, report it here as comment or in the forum – thanks

Maintenance works will start on 1st of Mai 2017

/0 Comments/by
Tobias

Elevate – support of OruxMaps 6.5.0 and future development of map styles

, ,

The Andromaps map styles won’t be updated as Christian already mentioned, and I want to add bit to that.

With the Release of OruxMaps 6.5.0 in the Google Playstore the long beta phase is finished and now the most common version supports Elevate 3. ist die lange Betaphase beendet und somit unterstützt auch die gängigste Version Elevate 3. If someone still uses Elevate 2 with the latest version of OruxMaps I can only advise to update.

Together with the adapted version for Locus the two most important apps are now running well with Elevat 3, as many others.

Therefore Elevate 2 will only get the most important updates from now on and at some point won’t be updated at all. The posibilities of Elevate 2 are pretty exhausted anyway. Elevate 2 will be kept available as well as the Andromaps map styles.

The recommended and regularly updated map style is Elevate 3. Accordingly I adjusted the map key and thinned it out a bit.

/0 Comments/by
ChristianK

OAM-staff is on vacance

We are both out on vacance. A real stunning thing to use our own maps in the Alps 🙂

 

The support of OpenAndroMaps is paused
from 23th till 30th of August 2015

 

Best regards
Tobias & Christian

/0 Comments/by
ChristianK

Server move done……

Finally its done without any downtime.
However – seriously, I don’t want to do this too often.

There are a lot af advantages for you:

  • short response times thanks to a fast server, 4 CPU-Cores, NGinx proxy
  • nice and better social-share buttons ensuring a zero-fingerprint while surfing
  • a new CDN ensures fast delivery of content all over the world (we’ll see if I can afford it..)
  • a better firewall for my own comfort 😉

Ok, back to making maps!

Best regards, Christian

/0 Comments/by