[OSM-talk] Freemap is dead, long live OpenFootMap (and a hosting question)

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone,

With an increasing interest in renderers for walking and hiking, and 
wanting to keep to the spirit of opencyclemap.org, openpistemap.org and 
opensantamap.org, I plan to re-launch Freemap as OpenFootMap, a name which 
will also hopefully make the link with OSM much more explicit.

Consequently I have registered openfootmap.org, which I also want to try 
and give a more international feel than Freemap (though it will likely be 
restricted to England in the first instance, as I don't have access to a 
huge server....)

Nonetheless I'd like to make the site the first port of call for 
collecting ideas for "OSM for walkers", and invite suggestions for 
styling, map features to show, icons, additional features, and so on.

I'd also like to get a bit of advice on hosting. Currently I am using a 
Bytemark VM for Freemap, but I'm wondering whether something like the 
Business package from uk2.net would give more server power, at the expense 
of root access.  Because client processing power is very much less 
expensive, financially, than the server end, I plan to make 
openfootmap.org much more lightweight on the server side than Freemap, by 
doing rendering at home, using the Mapnik OSM plugin, and simply serve 
static tiles from the server, much like tiles at home on the osmarender side. 


Hopefully if there is interest, individual contributors could sign up to a 
tiles at home like scheme and render their area on their own home machines. 
Consequently all I really need on the server side is basic PHP and MySQL 
provision and an SSH shell. So would people recommend sticking with 
bytemark or transferring to something like uk2?

Thanks,
Nick