MadMappers

MadMappers website has just been temporarily moved onto the Free Earth Foundation  servers so that MadMappers server storage capacity can be upgraded. 

This move may result in weird thing happening due to broken links: please report faults by mailing us the page url in question.

For some years now the Free Earth Foundation  have unconditionally supported the MadMappers initiative providing bandwidth and server support. A big thanks in particular to Nowak (Adam), f0urtyfive (Matt) and Bull_[UK] (Daniel) who have dedicated much of their time and outstanding expertise to make things happen.

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I am no good at this blogging thingy … for a number of months I had lost my blog password and I could neither reset the password or log in

Well, I discover now that the problem was the incorect username rather than the password

So now I am back in action … it’s going to take some time to brings things up to date, lots has been happening

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For the past 5 months the website has been remarkably quiet. Those who are close to the MM community know that this has been because MadMappers’ commitments have grown to such an extent that we have had little time for the website.

This is actually not correct: for financial reasons first (too much traffic!) and technical reasons later we have had to move (and set-up) our servers 3 times in the last 5 months, so in reality we have spent lot of our time learning to do ourselves all sorts of “web stuff” we knew nothing about.

And then … we spent lot of energies in many different projects which will come to some concrete results in the next few weeks. We are very excited on the future, great things are on the pipeline and we will try to update you one project at the time in the next few days. A few keywords to keep you wondering: AfricaTopo, WorldWindAfrica, Space, AfricaGIS2005, UNO ….

As some of you might have noticed that the MadMappers’ forum has been moved on Yahoo!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MadMappers/

and it now consists of 122 members. We receive an enormous amount of mails at info@madmappers.com and it would help us immensely if some of the “how do I …” would be directed to the forum.

Finally we would like to thank many MadMappers who have actively helped in the past months, in particular Hans, Peter, Duncan and Christian.

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February has been a long/short month.
Short  for the number of days in the calendar but mostly because many of the targets were not achieved. I guess we were over-ambitious: time, time, time.
Long, because as our monthly traffic cap shrunk very quickly and was exceeded extremely quickly: we would have liked this February to be only 10 days long!
In truth we had never hoped to have so much traffic, there are more MadMappers out there than expected. Very surprising to us was the area distribution of the traffic, truly international, with only 26% share for South Africa. All Continents were well represented except Asia.

Finally a big thanks to all the guys who have been helping: without you it would not have been possible.

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It was an exciting week! Virtually without any publicity, the website recorded more than 7000 hits (from 17 countries on 4 continents) in the first 24 hours. That was sufficient for our ISP, Fujitsu, to take notice of us, deciding to increase bandwidth and give us a chance. As a result, in the next few days we should start making available the first sets for free download. We will start from the South African mapset scale 1:250.000 and follow then with the South African series 1:50.000 by Province. We do have limitation in data storage, so we will rotate provinces weekly. Please remember: the objective is not to have everyone download indiscriminately everything, if you want a set rather purchase data on CD, cost will be a fraction of the connection cost.

We continue to seek sponsorships for the website: the end of the financial year is near, is everyone’s company in a tax loss position? Please spread the word around.

We are adding some pages which should address the many issues for which we received enquiries during the past week. One question we received repeatedly: where are the prices? If there is no price, then although the set is stored in the archive, it is not ready for public distribution yet. Reasons may be diverse: the set might have been priced, or it is not ready for distribution, or the author has not given authorization yet or … the set is not intended for public distribution at all. In the next few weeks the database will be modified to give reasons why some data is not yet available. Please be patient. MadMappers is a non-profit project based on voluntary work, please keep it in mind.

We also intend to start a new section “download of the week”: we will have there super-special stuff, keep your eyes open. In the meantime do not miss the “Gallery” where we are exhibiting interesting images: please contribute, show the world what MadMappers can do.

Finally: we have no experience on e-commerce. If you do please contact us for some advise. Some mapsets cannot be distributed unless we are able to collect some royalty fees.

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