It is quite amazing what can be done with good data and current map rendering technology. Mapnik and other renderers have continually pushed the envelope and there are many examples of beautiful maps out there.

The Unicode character set contains somewhat over one million code points from 0 to hex 10ffff. That wasn’t always so. Unicode started out with only 16 bit characters, or about 65000 code points. At some point it was decided that that wasn’t enough and the version 2.0 released in 1996 switched to the larger character set.

Taginfo always had an API so everybody can access all the juicy data in its database through simple HTTP queries. But that API was never used by anyone (as far as I can tell from a quick look at the log files). One reason was probably that I didn’t document the API.

In the past week two people contacted me independently who are working on Taginfo sites with local information for Ireland and Brazil. This prompted me to work on Taginfo again. Taginfo was never intended to be run on more than one web site, but it makes sense for other people to use it, too. So I incorporated some stuff that makes it easier to do that. Taginfo now has a new icon in the top left corner that can be changed for each instance, when you click on it you get some local information. Taginfo sites can add their address to the wiki.

I have wanted to play around with NodeJS for a while. I had some time on the weekend so I implemented a small tileserver for Tirex using NodeJS.