Been updating Haworth and Stoodley Pike area over Christmas break. These were areas recently visited on holiday. Encountered lots of error messages whilst using Potlatch. Something to do with encountering unexpected variables and multibyte errors. It seems from other diary entries there is a problem with the API.

Merkaator looks interesting as does Mapzen from the brief overview I've had. I intend to concentrate on my home town and add in other areas visited as and when.

Getting in to this now. Have had a dabble with both JOSM and Potlatch, managing to use both to make significant additions to the streets around where I live in Kenilworth, UK.

Being retired, I have good opportunity to get out on my bike and cycle round with the new Etrex Legend (bought the handlebar mount which is great). Must say I'm impressed with the accuracy of the traces. I've used my old Zen Vision to talk my way along the route. Several people in Kenilworth have now seen the mad cyclist who talks to himself!

I managed to get this to sync with the route in JOSM, but not before having to import/re-export the recorded WAV file into Audacity which is a pain...is JOSM the best tool for this type of work I wonder?

I'm finding the collection of traces quite infectious to the point at which they're coming in faster than I have opportunity to map them (not to mention a large archive of traces collected on various hiking holidays over the years, buried deep in the archives of my hard drive backups).

One thing that does puzzle me still is the fact that I can't register on the 'OSM' user forum as it says it isn't accepting new registrations...I've never heard of that. A lot of good stuff seems randomly buried in user diaries and the various responses/comments. I've picked up a lot of tips about utilities and projects from reading some of these entries.

I suppose my biggest failure to date was not getting WMS working for NPE maps or Yahoo imagery in JOSM. I use Windows Vista and followed all the instructions about webkit, but to no avail....just get a lot of red tiles and sometimes looping messages. That caused me to start investigating Potlatch where I have had a lot more success with background NPE maps,etc.

Well that's about where I am at present

Managed to figure out how to contribute after several hours reading and a local walk with my new etrex Legend today (hasn't appeared yet...great project