The Map Room

Today, after more than eight years and more than 4,000 posts, regular blogging on The Map Room comes to an end.

The blog will stay online and the archives will be accessible for as long as I have anything to say about it. But I won’t be looking for more material to blog about: no more scouring mailing lists, tweets and blogs; no more Google Alerts.

There will almost certainly an occasional post here in the future — I actually got a review copy of a book in the mail today — and if I have something to say on the subject of maps, I’ll say it here. So you might not want to unsubscribe from my RSS feed or my Twitter account just yet.

Why am I bringing things to an end? Eight years is a long time to spend on one thing and, truth be told, The Map Room has kept me from other projects, some of which have been on hold for this blog’s entire existence. Work on these projects will require me to disappear down the rabbit hole for weeks or even months at a time, which isn’t really compatible with regular blogging.

I also have to confess that this tough decision was made a little easier by the fact that ad revenues are down by more than half from their peak a few years ago. Fortunately, there are plenty of other excellent map blogs out there worth reading. It really is time to move on.

This is not to say that I’m abandoning maps altogether: in fact, two of those projects are map-related. I plan to do some research on the use of maps in fantasy literature. I also want to work on a beginner’s guide to OpenStreetMap, to encourage more people to contribute. I’ll let you know how those projects go. If you’d like to follow my progress on matters non-cartographical, join me on my personal website.

I’d be rude if I didn’t take this opportunity to thank everyone reading this — every visitor, every regular follower, every commenter, everyone who supported this site in financial and other ways.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of The Map Room, which I started on March 31, 2003. Yes, it’s been that long.

The site has gone through a number of different iterations and questionable site designs. In the past year alone, I’ve added Twitter as an option, moved to a new URL, upgraded my Movable Type install, and switched to another commenting system. All the while, I’ve been trying to juggle work on it with other web projects, employment contracts, and the viccisitudes of my medical condition.

But it’s basically the same site, with the same premise: it’s a blog on which I post links to map-related stuff that I find interesting, and I’m still not an expert. (No, I’m not. Really. Stop insisting otherwise.)

For this anniversary, I thought I’d delve into Google Analytics and see what my visitors are like — where you are, what you’re using, and what you’re looking for. On the eighth anniversary, here are some top eight lists. (Yes, top eight. Because I’m being cute.) After the cut, because most of you will find this completely boring.

Continue reading this entry.

The short version: comments are back. They’re powered by Disqus, and you can log in with one of several accounts (e.g., a Facebook, OpenID, Twitter or Yahoo account).

The long version would have involved an extended whinge on the complexity of getting comments working in Movable Type, how hard the server has been hit by the commenting engine of previous versions of Movable Type, an explanation of why I haven’t abandoned Movable Type for WordPress, my adventures in not getting comments, plugins and third-party extensions to work in this new Movable Type Pro install, still another justification for staying with Movable Type, and my adventures with comment spam.

But basically I wanted a pushbutton-simple commenting option that did not hammer my server, and Disqus seems to fit that bill quite nicely. We’ll have to see how it works in practice.

The Map Room has a new address: it’s now at maproomblog.com. I figured that after nearly eight years and four thousand entries, this little blog has earned itself the right to its own domain name.

All links to old addresses should automatically forward to the new URLs. Those of you reading via RSS have probably already gotten double posts of the last 30 entries: sorry about that, but it’s probably only a one-time thing.

I’ve also upgraded the blogging engine to Movable Type Pro 5. A lot of the benefits of doing so turned out to be impractical in this case, such as paged archives and tags, and it seems to take a lot longer to publish than the creaky old install of Movable Type 3.21 I’ve been using for so long, but I suspect that it’s better overall to be using the most recent version. And there are certain technical benefits for me to use Movable Type instead of, say, WordPress.

One benefit I had been looking forward to was being able to use more authentication methods for comments, but so far I haven’t been able to get the comments form to load on my individual entry pages. Probably beyond my limited technical expertise. So for now I’ve turned comments off. This has not been a heavily commented-on blog — I’ve gotten maybe one comment for every three blog entries — but that might have been a function of using a single obsolete authentication service that failed to work when many of you tried it. I’m not averse to getting comments up and running in the future, but in the meantime I’m going to try running without them for a while. (To be honest, I’d rather worry about posting new entries than about managing comments.)

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you. By all means send me a note if you feel a need to comment on an entry — I’ll update the entry or write a follow-up post as appropriate. Or write a reply on your own blog and send me the link. Or send me a comment via Twitter.

There are probably a few bugs on the site here and there, which I’ll have to clean up in the next few days. Don’t hesitate to let me know if you find one.

I’ve been on Twitter longer than most of you, but it was only this morning that I finally got around to setting up a dedicated Twitter account for The Map Room at @maproomblog. Links to all my new blog entries will obviously turn up there, but I’ll also be posting quick notes, responding to people, getting into fights, and retweeting interesting links. (Full posts on said links may follow, but that usually takes me a while.)

It’s also another way to send me link suggestions or other messages: I keep track of mentions, so I’ll see any tweet with “@maproomblog” in the text.

For lack of time to do the job properly, I’m closing down this blog’s calendar section. Be sure to check out John W. Doktor’s calendars of events and exhibitions and Tony Campbell’s list of forthcoming meetings. If there are any…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I bought an iPad over the weekend. I got the 64-gigabyte model with 3G, which, you may recall, also happens to come with a built-in GPS. (Fun if obvious fact: the GPS works regardless of whether you’re signed up for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Room is seven years old today. For a blog that was started as a way to learn more about maps, by someone who — at least at the beginning — was, shall we say, more interested than informed,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On the sidebar, you’ll notice a new Google Friend Connect box. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet, but if you use Google Friend Connect, you can use it here. The Map Room’s Facebook page has been around…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here are The Map Room’s top 10 bestselling map books in 2009, based on Amazon orders made through this website that were tracked by my Amazon Associates account. Of course this list is heavily influenced by the amount of attention…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here are The Map Room’s top ten entries for 2009, based on unique page views: Review: Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit (March 30, 2009) Italian Earthquake (April 6, 2009) Google Earth: Live Mars Imagery and More (March 18, 2009) “Dead Pixel…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Possibly worth mentioning: this is the 3,000th post I’ve made to The Map Room — six years and four months since the first entry went up at the beginning. It’s funny: the longer I do this, the less I have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I should mention that I’m on another contract for the next few months, so I will probably not be able to post new entries to this blog as often or as regularly as I would like. I’ll do what I…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve finally been doing some work on the directory. This morning, I got caught up on the year-long (!) backlog of new blogs, and pruned those blogs that have either gone dark or that haven’t posted in more than six…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Have I actually been doing this blog for six years already? Apparently so….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve redesigned this site (again); the new design went live a couple of hours or so ago, and I’ve been fiddling with fixes here and there ever since. As always, there is a risk that it doesn’t look quite right…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve started a new contract where Internet access is limited (especially for non-work purposes); posts will be sporadic over the next few weeks as a result. I’ll do my best to keep up….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today I’m launching a new feature here on The Map Room: a calendar of map-related events. It’s meant to cover conferences, talks, and similar events; exhibitions are more problematic because (1) there are so many of them and (2) their…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh, hi. No, I’m still here. My contract — I’m now in the 12th month of a 10-week contract — finally wraps up this week, and the last few weeks have been crazy. Hence, not as much time or energy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve just discovered that my spam filters have been a bit too aggressive lately. I’ve now approved some comments from the past month or so that were sitting in the junk comment queue. Honestly, I didn’t realize they were there….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Five years ago today, I wrote the first entry on this blog. I started The Map Room because I was unemployed and needed something to focus my interest and attention while I went about the dreary job of job hunting….  •  Continue reading this entry.

As an experiment, I’ve set up a Facebook page for this site. On a similarly crass and commercial note, I’ve set up a network on Feedburner for map blogs. Map bloggers who use Feedburner to produce their RSS feeds who…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apologies for the lack of new entries lately; I’ve had my hands full with a couple of things that needed dealing with. And then recovering from dealing with said things. New entries will be forthcoming soon. Lots of catching up…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Visitors to The Map Room may have noticed some screwy things going on today. I got it into my head to redesign this site, live. (No safe, out-of-the-way test sites for me, no sir.) The bulk of the work is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A few links to news stories to tide you over during the holidays: The Montreal Gazette on OpenStreetMap The Chicago Tribune on map collecting The Times rambles about the technology behind in-car navigation devices I’ll be off for about a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is the two thousandth post I have made to The Map Room. It’s taken me a while to get here: four years, four months, and a few extra days. When I started this blog, I was interested in maps,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh. I seem to have made PC World’s 100 Blogs We Love (relevant page here; the single-page printer friendly version is easier to peruse), among some much more impressive company….  •  Continue reading this entry.

First, three more map/geospatial blogs for you: Free GeoTools by Leszek Pawlowicz, which started in January; points to (mostly Windows) software tools and data sources; covers quite a bit of ground, actually. Hablandodesigs by Juan Manuel Uribe Medina, a Mexican…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been mucking around with the site design today. No real design goals in mind — that would presuppose that I know what I’m doing — just tinkering, seeing what works. Weird stuff may manifest itself from time to time…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In preparation for a Movable Type upgrade, I have changed all the URLs for the individual entry and archive pages. Old links are being autoforwarded to the new URLs, so don’t worry about that. But this change will probably cause…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The short version: comments are back on, though I haven’t finished all the planned upgrades; and TypeKey registration is now required to comment on this blog. About TypeKey: it’s free and relatively painless, so hopefully it will not be too…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve disabled commenting until I figure out how to reduce the memory usage of the comments script and improve the performance of the site overall. (The script has been getting killed by DreamHost’s automated process watcher, a sign that it’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Room and my other sites will be offline for several hours while my hosting provider’s building management performs emergency maintenance; details here and here. The outage is expected to take place Sunday morning between 2:15 EST/7:15 UTC and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is, by my count, the 1,500th post to The Map Room, which I will now waste by emitting stunned noises at having reached the 1,500-post mark. Whoa….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of announcements related to my sad attempt to earn a living from web projects like these. This site now accepts donations via PayPal via the button on top of the right-hand sidebar. (Donations may also be made against…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ongoing core router issues at DreamHost have made this site inaccessible for much of the last 12 hours. They promise that a major upgrade Monday evening will (hopefully) solve this problem (my sites will be offline again for 30 to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Every so often, I get fidgety about my current site design and start thinking about a change. That happened again recently, and, as a result, a new site design went up last night. I wanted a lighter, three-column design that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Just back from my trip (see previous entry) — I still managed to post a few entries, so you may not have noticed my absence. Back to my regular posting routine shortly….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m on vacation as of tomorrow, and will be for a couple of weeks. As is typical for me, I’ll continue to post new entries as I’m able to do so — it just won’t be at the same frenetic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

My hosting provider has had a serious spate of outages and other technical difficulties lately. Rather than post every last incidence of the site going down, I’ve decided to post such reports to my WordPress.com account; check there for updates…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Short outages during the past two days — a result of my hosting provider having all sorts of trouble happen to them (more here). With any luck, I’ll have some new entries for you tomorrow….  •  Continue reading this entry.

While many of you use RSS to find out when new entries have been posted to this site, others may have no idea what those three little letters mean. Just for you, I’ve just set up e-mail subscriptions via FeedBurner…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sorry about the downtime (since yesterday afternoon); I goofed up with the .htaccess file in a way that generated a server error for the entire site, and only realized the problem just now. My bad….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve disabled trackbacks: too much spam was getting through the filters; not enough legitimate pings received to make it worthwhile; and sending trackback pings to other servers frequently generated errors that resulted in multiple pings being sent every time I…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As Hugo has noticed, there is a problem with The Map Room’s RSS feeds: yesterday they stopped updating properly, and starting yesterday and continuing today you may receive an error when trying to retrieve the feed. The problem is at…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last Friday, The Map Room turned three years old. I’m not making much of a fuss this year (compared to last year, when I simultaneously launched a reader survey and a webhosting-bill fundraising drive, and posted an essay in honour…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I just finished upgrading to Movable Type 3.2; if you’re reading this, it presumably went well. But there’s always a chance of a bug somewhere that needs fixing, so if you experience some wonky behaviour on this site, that might…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been meaning to reorganize the entry categories for some time, and I’ve taken a first step this morning: “Web Tools,” which mainly covered Google, Mapquest et al., is now Online Maps; “Hacks” is now a subcategory of Online Maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Since yesterday, AdBrite has started running network ads — for such relevant products as job sites, online pharmacies, etc. — on the ad strip on the right sidebar despite my wishes; I’ve e-mailed them to complain, but based on what’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While procrastinating the big post on the Chinese map, I’ve moved and revamped the map questions RSS feed: it now shows all open questions (they stay open for 30 days), as well the answers to those questions. (I’ve also been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been fiddling with the site again (see previous entry), so periodic bouts of weirdness may have been appearing over the last few days and may continue to appear. (I’m flouting web design best practices by coding live rather than…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I got Hacking Movable Type for Christmas and it’s been giving me all kinds of ideas for this site. First, I’ve set up a new RSS feed that tracks the most recent reader comments. Now that comment spam has been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve created a new Directory page: it’s a combination of my old Communities page, which listed associations, online communities and mailing lists, and my blogroll, which I removed from the sidebar in the last redesign to reduce clutter. I’ll try…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t care what Feedburner tells me; there is no way I can have 88,184 readers of my partial RSS feed. (Until yesterday it was reporting a number that fluctuated between 800 and 1,000.) The culprit appears to be My…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Room was unavailable for a couple of hours today (as were my other sites) due to a router problem at DreamHost, my hosting provider….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The tinkering with the site design I mentioned Sunday got a bit more involved this evening — or rather it got carried away, since I didn’t expect to be finished already. Still a few details to work on over the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I had a bit of energy today, so I started making some minor changes to the site design, mostly with the aim of reducing clutter, adding some white space and just simplifying the design. At the moment it’s in medias…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of authors have asked me whether I’d be interested in reviewing their books and where to send them. To aid future inquiries, I’ve now added information about book reviews to the About page: what I’m willing to look…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Room was unavailable for nearly seven hours today; my hosting provider was knocked offline by the power outage that hit Los Angeles this afternoon. All my sites were offline until just a few minutes ago. More posts tomorrow….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s the long-promised, long-delayed second part of the results of The Map Room’s reader survey. You may recall that the survey took place in early April, and it took me approximately forever to get around to tabulating the results. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Way back in April, I asked my readers to fill out a short survey; 120 of you did, which I thought was pretty good. It’s taken me some time to compile the results — which is putting it mildly, since…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This morning I uploaded a new design that I’ve been working on for a few days. I hope you like it; some of you had expressed a dislike of the old olive-green-and-yellow colour scheme. I was beginning to feel it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Shortly after my last post on Friday, our cable connection to the Internet was snapped, presumably by a passing vehicle, and we’ve only been able to get it reconnected today. (One of the disadvantages of living in a small town…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new full-text RSS feed is now available. The original, excerpts-only feed is still available, and will remain as the default feed for autodiscovery. But those of you who’ve been asking for a full-text feed now have that option. (In…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An update to the Tags page: instead of the old method of displaying map-related photos from Flickr, which was built from a search-based RSS feed and updated only when the index pages on this site were rebuilt, you can now…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Communities page has been updated with more links to map societies stolen taken from this site (see previous entry). It’s still a long way from definitive, though; there must be dozens of mailing lists alone still out there….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve redesigned the site a little bit — trying to make it a bit less cluttered. Hope it agrees with you. (For those of you who detest the colour scheme, I hope to have something for you shortly.) The non-blog…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Thanks to everyone who responded to the reader survey — all 120 of you. That’s plenty for me to work with, and it’s been a week, so I’ll close it and get to work on the results, which I hope…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s donated so far (see previous entry). I appreciate it very much. One problem with the donation model is that the value-for-money equation is poorly defined: a subscription model yields tangible benefits, but a donation…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Response to the reader survey (previous entry) has been tremendous, much more than I expected. Thanks for taking the time. I have the best readers. If you haven’t done the survey yet, there’s still time — my plan is to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today marks The Map Room’s second anniversary. There have been more than 460 entries since my first; during that time I’ve learned just how much there is out there about which I know nothing, from psychogeography to triangulation to geocaching….  •  Continue reading this entry.

When The Map Room made Fimoculous’s list of best blogs of 2003, he said this: 27) The Map Room — I love niche publishing, especially when it’s a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I’d probably pay for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s a dubious way to celebrate this blog’s second anniversary, but I thought it’d be neat to do a reader survey. If you don’t mind answering 20 questions, I’d be grateful if you’d give it a shot. All questions are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two minor changes. First, the search form on the left-hand side now searches just The Map Room, not the entire mcwetboy.net domain. (A full web search remains an option.) I didn’t realize until recently that you could narrow a Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The details of my efforts to get comments working on this blog after the upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 are set out on my personal blog, if you’re truly interested. But insofar as how commenting will work from here on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Comments aren’t working the way they should. You can still comment if you’re willing to put up with additional hurdles and error messages, but there’s something up with the TypeKey authentication: my test comments get sent to the approval queue…  •  Continue reading this entry.

New feature. Map Folksonomies now has its own page; it used to be on the left-hand sidebar. This page links to mapping-related tags used on sites that use tags. So far that means del.icio.us, Flickr, and MetaFilter (including the Ask…  •  Continue reading this entry.

All right, I think it’s working now. Comments on this site now use TypeKey authentication. If you have a TypeKey identity, you can post a comment and it will show up immediately; otherwise, it will be held in a queue…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve just upgraded the blogging software that powers The Map Room to Movable Type 3.15. This site may not work as expected as I try to work out the kinks. Commenting in particular might be problematic. Patience in the meantime….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve gotten a couple of requests to fix links in older posts. I should say something, for future reference, about what my informal policy is on this subject. Which is, in a nutshell, that I don’t plan to repair dead…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’d like to track Map Questions by RSS, a feed is now available. It’s a full-text feed in RSS 1.0 format, and contains the 15 most recent questions and the number of answers given so far to each answer….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Announcing a new feature on The Map Room: Map Questions. Here’s the premise. Every now and then I get a question by e-mail about a map-related subject — for example, where they can buy a certain map, or whether an…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Since I have neither shame nor subtlety, let me point out that nominations for the 2005 Bloggies are now open, if you’re interested in nominating this (or any other) blog in one of the categories….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Organizational note: the recent posts about the U.S. election results have been moved, along with related older posts, from the News & Politics category to the new Electoral Maps category….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Site owners are invariably far more interested in their sites’ traffic stats than their readers are, but I hope you won’t mind this brief digression. Have a look at the daily page views (I don’t have discrete daily visitor stats)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Page layout might be a bit weird for the next day or two as I give The Map Room a bit of a makeover. Your patience, please, if I occasionally break things in the process. Update: I seem to be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Once again I’ve been away from The Map Room for too long: life and other projects have conspired to keep me from posting here, and now I’ve got a rather large backlog of stuff to post. Apologies to those who’ve…  •  Continue reading this entry.