Craig Mod's walk in Japan manton.org
@manton that is a fascinating idea. The conversation is a bit one sided perhaps? Glad I saw the previous walk site, beautiful, Koya Bound — Eight Days on Japan's Kumano Kodo.
@johnjohnston your current setup is gorgeously bare. What changes would you bring to it? The ability (like the page @manton linked to) to scroll images and link them to specific points in the map?
@nitinkhanna thanks. Scrolling might be nice. I’ve only got vague ideas floating in my head. Text over the map. Map opacity changing. Better mobile. But something I can do myself. It is a very slow project. Google maps changed their api twice before I switched on open street map..
@manton That’s a great point he makes about being able to separate the publishing from the consumption, and a great strength of what you’ve done here with Micro.blog—I can publish to my blog whenever (and however) I want, and check in with the Timeline (or not) on an entirely different “whenever” schedule.
@manton Also, back (back!) in the day, Mozilla hacker Jeff Walden blogged this through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, in posts much longer than SMS, but which supports your idea that it would be a good use of a blog. It was a great way to follow along (intermittently—this was pre-ubiquitous cellular internet—when he found internet and uploaded his posts and photos). // @johnjohnston @nitinkhanna @nitinkhanna
@johnjohnston those are some good ideas. Yeah, it’s good to move away from the Google Maps API, even though their tiles are beautiful and we’re so used to them.
@johnjohnston about scrolling - I have been looking for solutions or examples of things others have done and here's one that's very impressive.
They use a custom tile, which is not necessary, and the backend is a WP blog. But what matters is how they've setup the CSS so that scrolling seems to work well. The left hand side map stays exactly in it's place throughout.
About the rest - text over map is certainly possible, but wouldn't it be better to somehow link it so that as you're scrolling through text and photos, it should focus on the point where the photo was taken so that the right hand side talks about the view on the left?
Slow project is good, right? It means you tinker with it whenever it itches :)
@nitinkhanna thanks 🙏, that is a cool site. I like the idea of the map updating as sections scroll into view. I could probably use photo descriptions from Flickr if I needed text. As I recall the painterly tiles are easy enough to add but I think I prefer contour lines. A switch might be good. Slow is quite a good speed for me, walking or making webpages;-)
@johnjohnston I forgot to link you to the GitHub repo. It shows clearly about how the code works.
Yes, the scroll view is something that would work so much better than the current autorotating solution on your page.
The painterly tiles are nice, but I'm not a fan of abstracted maps unless they're specially for artistic purposes.
Hopefully a slow walk to a more interactive page :)