About Hiker Atlas

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Anger and hubris. Like most good things, these two emotions drove me to build Hiker Atlas.

Anger: despite being a paying AllTrails subscriber, I somehow got my paid account on their WAF blacklist. It's been fixed, but at the time, it felt absurd. The data is mostly open source or crowd-sourced. I'm paying them for this privilege, and yet they block me?

Hubris: hey, they're just showing open source information, how hard could it be?

Turns out, it's a little involved. This blog documents my journey as I learn about open-source cartography, circa 2024. Hope it's helpful to someone!

• 2024-01-14: Glossary of web mapping terms
• 2024-01-14: 30,000 foot overview of how mapping works
• 2024-01-18: Lua tricks: let multiple threads write to a file safely
• 2024-01-21: tilemaker: build an autosuggest index
• 2024-01-28: automating builds with GitHub Actions
• 2024-02-03: cartographic generalization: ranking features with qrank
• 2024-10-05: tile-smush, a faster tile-join for MBTiles files
• 2024-10-06: tilemaker: node_keys and way_keys