Old notes, archived 2013-09-04:
Gene, thank you for writing up your excellent story about Sunday's Jane's Walk over on your blog. Hadn't realized how many photographs you were able to capture during the walk! This will remain among the important reminders of my time here. Thanks! If you're tentatively up for it, the Jane's Walk website is already set up to pencil in next year's walks. Perhaps you can decide on a starting point, a brief outline, and we can create that "Appointment" necessary to maintain momentum for such an annual event. What Think? -- HiMY
Done! I've submitted an entry for a walk on Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 1pm, starting at the foot of Broadway. Thanks again for organizing this year's! - Gene
Gene, without looking at every neighbourhood page's map related changes, I will assume you were the one who did the bulk of the mapping of the neighbourhoods on the wiki. If so, how much time did it take? Per map as well as overall ? I have 240 or so to do on TorontoWiki. Hence I am asking to best budget my time. - HiMY
Hmm...a good question. I did it in 2009-2010 in Google Maps (where the drawing tools are a bit easier to use, and it was pre-Oakland Wiki) over the course of several months. But I was also spending a lot of time researching neighborhoods, as my map has unofficial and historical neighborhoods, not just the "official" ones. They imported the .KML file into Oakland Wiki to use as a starting point. People have made additional changes in OW, and I've made additional changes to my version of the map, adding some historical neighborhoods. So the two are diverging. In any event, you can see my Google map version here on Our Oakland. - Gene
Thank you Gene, your big picture approach is just enough knowledge to confirm/nudge me into doing what I first thought of doing to speed things up for TorontoWiki. The comments section in your Our Oakland map page is gold! Many thanks for all the hard work! - HiMY
One further note. Google Maps has a cutoff point where more than some number of areas added to a map get put on separate pages. Which kind of ruins the whole map if you can only see pieces of it at a time. The work-around for that is to host the KML file separately. You still create it in Google Maps, dealing with the annoyance of pagination, and then export the KML file. Host that somewhere else (e.g., http://www.designsinlight.com/oakland/neighborhoods.kml) and then Google Maps will show it all on one map. - Gene
Am sort of treading down the same rabbit hole... I am visually looking at the crowd sourced neighbourhood google map created by The Toronto Star newspaper in one browser window, and manually creating neighbourhood maps in TorontoWiki in a separate open browser window. Rationale being, than even if I imported their KML file, it would have to be refined much more than it is to begin with. Plus the whole zen thing of creating each map one by one... - HiMY
Another resource that wasn't available when I was doing my map is Google Maps itself. If you search for a neighborhood name within a city, e.g., Carleton Village, Toronto, ON, Canada Google Maps will put a faint dotted line around the neighborhood. Obviously doesn't work for unofficial or historical neighborhoods, but is a good reference.
Gene -- While eating lunch, I found some sources of great info regarding Dietz Opera Hall, College of California and MVC. Check these out http://collections.museumca.org/?q=list/taxonomy/term/11278&page=, and http://www.mountainviewcemetery.org/justpublished.html (sample chapter here).
Awesome! I'd found the former, but hadn't thought to look in the latter (a copy of which is on my shelf :-)
