Another Friday Memebog

It's back! A superb example of web publishing at its best, Lost Railways of West Yorkshire disappeared from the net for a while, but now it's back, with quite a lot of new material. Even the links page is a delight: foremost amongst which are Forgotten Relics of an Enterprising Age and Bradford Villages. These are all sites that do what I would love to do, but do it better than I ever could.

Google have announced a new static Google Maps API. Similar in spirit to the Charts API that I've been using to graph my diabetes monitoring, it would have done nicely for the map of Bradford's SSSIs in my prior post. An equally interesting alternative is Ordnance Survey Openspace, announced earlier this year. Currently in 'alpha', it will be interesting to see how it develops. Currently it has 1:50000 and street-level mapping. However, the latter is bereft of any terrain or footpath features, and the 1:.25000 maps are apparently still considered too valuable. The ideal tool would combine layers for historic mapping, aerial/satellite photography, geotagged images and the OS 1:25000 data; interestingly, some of that exists already at ponies.me.uk.