Robin's Blog

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British Placename Mapper – follow-up and links to cool maps

A couple of weeks ago, I released the British Placename Mapper, which is a website that allows you to search place names in Great Britain and show them on a map. You can do searches like finding all the places starting with ‘great’, or ending with ‘burgh’ or containing ‘sea’. I tweeted and tooted about […]

Simple self-hosted OpenStreetMap routing using Valhalla and Docker

I came up with an interesting plan for an artistic map recently (more on that when I’ve finished working on it), and to create it I needed to be able to calculate a large number of driving routes around Southampton, my home city. Specifically, I needed to be able to get lines showing the driving […]

Some easy recipes

This is a bit different to what I usually post on this blog (which is usually technical content about GIS, remote sensing, Python and data analysis – see a few example posts), and this is part of April Cools – a group of bloggers writing posts that are unusual for them, but still good content. […]

Explore UK place names on a map – my new web app

As an Easter present for you all, I’ve got a new web app you can play with. It lets you search for UK place names – things like ‘ends with burgh’ or ‘starts with great’ or ‘contains sea’ – and then plot them on an interactive map. Once you’ve done that, you can even share […]

My geospatial PDF talk at FOSS4G 2021

This is only about 3 years late – but I gave a talk at FOSS4G 2021 on geospatial PDFs. The full title was: From static PDFs to interactive, geospatial PDFs, or, ‘I never knew PDFs could do that!’ The video is below: In the talk I cover what a geospatial PDF is, how to export […]