Here at Sparkgeo, while we often prefer to provide answers over visualizations, we still make a lot of web maps. And when we do, we take pride in producing high-quality cartographic products. Cartography is a vast subject, encompassing everything from overall page design to the smallest detail in typography. The representation of geographic features with …
Building automated tests is the liver and onions of the programming world. Everyone agrees that it’s good for you, but no one really wants to get into it. I find this is takes place for three reasons: First, we often aren’t sure what to test when building new features. Second, setting up the testing environments …
Fast and Furious E2E: Using Testcafe for Easy End-to-End Testing Read More »
A trail map is seemingly so simple. But, to create a really ‘good’ trail map we need to consider a few key things: 1) Seasonality – your map needs to tell the story of the adventure in hand. For instance a skiing or showshoeing trail should feel cold and wintery. In this case we needed […]
A short example of CartoCSS class-based line rendering. CartoCSS is everywhere it seems. Well, it’s in Mapbox Studio and CartoDB, as well as whatever hand rolled option you choose. (However it is not geoserver CSS, though it looks somewhat similar). I used CartoCSS to render the below image. It’s a nordic ski map and has a […]
Scale has taken on a completely new meaning for me. In my training and early career, scale referred to a conversion measurement indicating a comparison between a measurement on a paper map and a measurement in the real world. The big ‘thing’ about GIS was that it was scale-less; you could zoom in as much […]
Google Maps have been with us since February 2005, virtually a decade ago as I write this (expect a party on Feb 8th 2015). From their acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies and Keyhole, Google ignited a cartographic web revolution. Yes, of course there were maps on the internet pre-Google Maps, but Google brought the web […]
Dustin Sampson (@gridcell), one of our geospatial developers presented the core ideas behind tracking slippy map analytics at FOSS4G in September (2014, Portland). Check out his presentation here >>> Presentation Description Google Analytics is a great tool for monitoring and reporting on website traffic and user interactions but what it doesnt tell you is that […]
GeoJSON is a great format, easy to read/view/use but one thing that really stands out is the verbosity of numbers and its effects on file size. Yeah in rare cases it “may” be needed but I’m pretty sure a length that is precise to, well less than a millimeter (example: stream length: 6849.41980435 meters) is […]
Earlier in this series we pulled together a PostGIS database of US Census Polygons and displayed them on a Google Map. To do this we used the mighty Mapnik via node.js by using the node-mapnik connector. This tutorial will show you a way of displaying all those […]
