Creating personalized maps with umapper

I registered with umapper some time ago to check out what they have going with their beta, but for a while I struggles to figure out what I would use it for. It was easy to figure out for work, I could create maps to find the most popular destinations in the area for people visiting Bradford, but for me? That was another story.

After my 10th anniversary and our trip into New England it all became clear. So over the past week or so I have been goofing around with it creating a map of our trip. I have been adding spots where we stopped along the way, where we stayed and things we did.What I have found about umapper is that while it is an interesting tool with a lot of features, once there are a lot of nodes for your path place on the map; it is very slow to respond. The sluggishness of it isn't enough to turn me off completely, but it really makes things tedious to get anything done at an acceptable rate. It's not like my computer is a grizzled old rust bucket either, and I would expect it to eventually respond with more vigor than it does currently.

Overall though, umapper is great. You can upload kml files that can be exported from Google Earth, so it's really easy to create a precise path of your journey. It would be easier if I could plot those directions through the umapper interface like in Google Maps, but since they allow you to use of 3 different map services (Google Maps, Microsoft Visual Earth, and OpenStreet) I can see where this would be a nice-to-have feature rather than a deal breaker.Once you select your map service it's a cake walk from there. The UI is easy to use and not headache inducing to figure out how to create and edit your map and location information. Honestly, when I first got into the interface, I was surprised at how many features it has, and all of the things you can do fairly easily to your map. Here's a good post on the umapper blog about the feature set of available.

Check out my map, and if you have any desire to share your trip with the intarwebs…. share it with umapper.

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