Colophon

chris

Posted under: News

Lift Pitch

Trek in Ireland’s goal is to encourage the local people of Ireland and visiting tourists to get outdoors and visit the thousands of short strolls and hikes available at their doorstep through the use of innovative interactive mapping.

Executive Summary

Trek in Ireland is a community based site that provides detailed interactive mapping of local strolls, walks and hikes across Ireland. It offers the user not only accurate, advanced mapping, but a social experience with a social network presence and integrated forums to build on the community nature of the site.

The site fills the current gap in a walking route website that provides mapping for both Northern and Southern Ireland. Furthermore the site has been developed with a move to the smart phone in mind. A future iPhone application is to be put into development soon to allow GPS enabled routes and maps to be downloaded and viewed whilst out of data reception areas.

The key areas of the site are the mapping, which features innovative elevation data overlaid on the map, complete route mapping as opposed to single map points. Easy to understand route filters, information and ratings, allows the user to easy find a route in the area they want, that they know they can trust and it will be of a suitable difficulty for their ability.

History of Trek in Ireland

Trek in Ireland came about following the failure of my first major project idea, which was to Geo-track an expedition group as they crossed the ice cap. This fell through due to possible weak / no GPS signal in that area.

Trek in Ireland came out as a way to look to integrate current technology with walking, with a particular aim to introduce the mobile web. Whilst this goal has not been achieved I hope the site will gain a loyal community following making iPhone apps a viable and useful product.

Designed by Chris Shields

I don’t believe in run of the mill websites, with their basic features and complete underuse of the technology and API’s available. I believe websites should be alive, filled with interest for the user, every click a pleasing experience.

With Thanks

A big thanks to Adrian & Gordon at The Design Zoo for their feedback on the site design and route the iPhone application should take.

NetTuts for a brilliantly detailed star rating system.

Stock Photography

Navigation images sources from istockphoto.com

Code & Libraries

PHP 5

HTML 5

CSS3

XML

JQuery

Google Maps API v3

Google Maps API v2

Google Maps Elevation API

WordPress

WordPress Forums (Plugin)

WordPress custom parameter (Plugin)

Resources

Star Rating Tutorial

Embedded Fonts

Sansa-Semibold

Hand of Sean

Unique Features

PolyLine Elevation Data

North / South Routes

Integrated Forums

Technical Wizardry

I’d just like to point out how awesomely unique elevation colour coded polylines are on my maps. Each full route is broken down into states, evaluated for elevation changes then rebuild and rendered on the map. This process takes 2 samples for each polyline and calculates a gradient change, where as the visualisation chart takes a grand total of 200 samples from the entire route.

Whilst it’s still in a relatively beta stage, I hope to be able to drastically improve its accuracy while keeping the number of API requests to a minimum. It’s a balancing act between being able to provide a rich amount of information and having acceptable loading times.

Upcoming Features & Changes

• Improvements to elevation data
• Compass bearings at waypoints
• New icon sets (following feedback)
• As always more routes
• User submited photography
• Flickr Geo-tagged images integration
• Near You route finding
• Save to PDF downloads
• jQTouch quick route finder

Wishful Thinking

• OS Mapping Integration (not currently available in Ireland)
• Cross-site map sharing

Read More..