How it Works

This is your typical PHP/mySQL website - mySQL storing the data, and PHP formatting, enriching and delivering it to you as "W3C XHTML 1.0 strict" compliant HTML. Some Javascript to display and control the map, and power the table filters. W3C compliant CSS to make it look purty. That's about it, really.

Credits

• Google for their excellent Maps API.
• PHP GeoCalc for the "How Far Away?" calculations.
• Luke Woodward for the regex needed to parse the BOF fixtures page.
• Time_Since for human-readable last-modified information.
• GridRef2LatLong for conversion from the OSGB grid reference to latitude and longitude. Luke wrote the library in PHP, deriving it from P Kent's CPAN modules Geography::NationalGrid and Geography::NationalGrid::GB.
• Lytebox for the pop-up map extracts and website boxes.
• BBClone for visitor stat tracking.

• NPE Maps and their contributors, for the list of GB postcodes and their latitude/longitude.
• British Orienteering for providing their fixtures and maps lists, and making Map of Maps official by linking here.
• Multimap for the OS maps of the areas.
• Geograph for photographs of the areas.

• Ian Webb for taking time to notify me of tens of map and event corrections.
• Nopesport and Attackpoint readers and others who have suggested improvements, fixed event and map details.
• Pat Martin for accepting all the corrections and updating the BOF fixtures page regularly.
• Various clubs for linking here from their own webpages.

Stats

• Number of Maps: 2641 (also 1416 school maps and 618 duplicates.)
• Number of Map Extracts: 177 (N.B. Some extracts may not be linked to a map currently in the database.)
• Number of Events: 1072

History

First, there was Map of Maps 1. This was before the days of Google maps mashups or the BOF database of maps, so it used a Flash interactive map from Map Bureau. A CSV list of area I had run was read in on loading. It contained links to map extracts for some of the areas. It wasn't very interactive but it was a start. You can still see it here although it will be taken down soon to avoid confusion.

Then, there was Map of Maps 2. This was out shortly after the Google Maps API was released, and mashups started appearing all over the net. It was a fairly simple display of maps from the BOF maps database (available from the web by entering a * in the search box.) It didn't have postcode geocoding, only looked at maps rather than events, and didn't have extracts or distances. It's been recently taken down and the old link to it is now pointing to Map of Maps 3.

Finally, there was Map of Maps 3. This is where you are now. It actually originally wasn't a map of maps, but rather a map of events - the maps themselves were only added later. It was written as a response to a query on the NopeSport website, and took about a week of evenings to write the original version - although it has been much tweaked since then.