Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

#97 Set Up an OpenGuide for Your Hometown

HACK

Now you should be able to view your OpenGuide on the Web! Open a web

browser and visit the URL that maps to your cgi-bin, or wherever you just

configured your OpenGuide to live.

Customizing Your OpenGuide

You should now see the front page of your new site; it looks very bare. Click

the “Edit this page” link to edit the front page, or select the “Create a new

page” link. Then start documenting your favorite interesting pages!

When you edit or create a new page in OpenGuides, you’ll see an edit form

that will be familiar to you if you’ve ever used a wiki. The top box in the

form is for a description, review, or commentary about the place in

question.

There are extra options for place metadata, which make OpenGuides quite dif-

ferent from an ordinary wiki. Figure 9-10 shows some of these options. Each

page can go in one or several Categories, and also in one or more Locales. A

Locale is a neighborhood or other local area. OpenGuides allows people to

define what they think belongs in particular “areas” on a freeform basis.

There’s also a lot of optional metadata for each page: contact details, open-

ing hours, web links, etc. There’s also space for interesting spatial metadata:

a street address and postal code, a link to a map, and coordinates.

OpenGuides comes from the UK. It was originally developed to power the