Steps toward a Route Catalog
There are several good mapping tools for bike routes, but I haven't found any that allowed maintaining and viewing a catalog of routes on a single map. I'm a nerd, so it made sense that I should try to assemble my own.
This simple catalog shows the most recent bikely.com routes for Atlanta. It reads the RSS feed from bikely.com to find the list of routes, then downloads the routes from bikely.com to display on a Google Map.
The URL also takes a 'user' parameter, so the URL http://routes.cycling.jettmarks.com/showRoutes.html?user=jett will show just the routes that I've recently added. This works for any user in bikely.com, but at this time, I haven't written the code to adjust the map location or zoom level to match the routes that are loaded. (Like a house, applications always have a list of improvements to be made.)
Labels: bike-routes
posted by Jett @ 5:06 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Very, very cool. I have ideas along similar lines, but have not yet had a chance to implement them. Nicely done!
However, when I put in apertome as the user, I don't see anything, even if I scroll to where I live. Not sure what is going on there.
Hey Apertome, you're bringing up a point that would be good to explain.
The code reads from an RSS feed that only includes routes from the past 14 days. I'm working to provide a way to read more of the public routes that bikely.com provides.
You can test a given user name as follows: Try using a URL that looks like this: http://www.bikely.com/rss/by/apertome. The results will be the list of routes this code is able to reach and display.
I've added a method to read the HTML page for a user instead of just the RSS feed, so routes will show up as long as they are made public. Instead of the URL http://www.bikely.com/rss/by/user, it now reads from the URL http://www.bikely.com/listpaths/by/user.
I'm only parsing the first page of routes; if all of them were brought in, it could really drag down performance. As it is, having about 30 loaded routes is rather painful.
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