Sunday afternoon with tilemill, sinatra and polymaps
I had a rare Sunday on my own today... if you don't include the dog. She was hoping for a 6 hour dog-walkathon, I was hoping to play with Tilemill on a rainy afternoon. We did both in the end.
So while Millie picked the (phantom) rabbit fluff from her teeth in front of the fire, I set about creating tiles of marine protected areas. Turned out to be very simple. The install was easy and the map styling css stuff was a pleasure. Exporting to MBTile format took a bit of time but I hear thats being looked at. Not exporting zoom 0 and 1 made it much faster (it was a 100MB global dataset)- around 30 mins I think.
Here's a polymap of the marine protected areas served from a little sinatra app I wrote on top of the MBTile sqlite database. And here is the code
[I reduced the extent to keep the db under the free *skinflint* 5MB limit set by heroku]
Not bad for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Millie wasn't bothered about the tiles by the way.
