Let's Talk About Your Geostack is a workshop aimed at getting participants up and running with the open source software and open data needed to build a very simple web mapping application that, despite its simplicity, demonstrates
- a PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database holding
- a metro extract of OpenStreetMap data that gets used with
- TileMill and TileStream to style, render, and serve map tiles, plus
- a simple Node.js API that returns GeoJSON so that
- the Leaflet mapping library can display markers and popups for points of interest.
All installed and running on the participant's own computer.
The workshop itself can be comfortably presented in four hours, allowing for some digressions and exploratory studio time. In advance of the workshop, participants need to set aside an additional three hours or so for downloading and installing software. The deck contains instructions for Mac OS X, Ubuntu 14, and Windows 8.1, including the option of using virtual machines via VirtualBox.
An early version of the workshop was run at MaptimeSF in Nov 2013. More recently, it's been/being offered at
- NACIS Annual Meeting 2014, 11 Oct 2014, Pittsburgh, PA
- FOSS4G 2014, 8 Sep 2014, Portland, OR
If the deck ends up being a sizable component in a workshop you offer, feel free to send me a pull request that adds it to the list.
The deck is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. My intent is that the deck be used by people studying on their own time, either individually, or in a group where everyone has come together voluntarily to learn. If a presenter is being paid for their time as they lead people through this deck, in any context, they need to contact me about licensing.
Two small code repositories that accompany this deck, geostack-api and
geostack-map-pages, are MIT-licensed.
If you come across any inaccuracies, or have other suggestions for improving this deck, please consider opening an issue or submitting a fix via a pull request.
The deck uses Hakim El Hattab's wonderful reveal.js.
Screenshots are taken using Apple OS X's Grab utility after setting window size with Irradiated Software's
SizeUp. SizeUp's Center shortcut is set to use an absolute size of
1024w 704h.
Web screenshots use Chrome after disabling View ➭ Always Show Bookmark Bar, then applying SizeUp.
TIF files saved from Grab are added to the images directory following a loose naming convention of
ApplicationName-Action-Detail.tiff. TIF files are generally resized to 768w 528h at 72 pixels/inch and saved to
the images directory as non-interlaced PNGs. Both the unaltered TIF and sized PNG are committed to the repository.