[mapserver-users] joining message

[evilC]

Hi, I just joined this list.
My name is Clive Galway and I run the London And Regional Dirtboarding
Association (www.lard-ass.com) - a non-profit club for Mountain Boarders
(Think snowboard with wheels) in London, UK and the surrounding
counties.
I am using MapServer to make a BASIC map of London listing places where
there are trails to ride etc.
I have a big raster ( 6000x6000 ish at the moment but it may end up
bigger) as the background as I could not lay my hands on free vector
data showing London roads, parks etc. If anyone knows where I could get
this data free, please let me know !
I plan on using that as a background image, and then make a shapefile
from scratch for clickable hotspots which will simply link to a web page
that contains info on that location. At the moment I am having to try
and find software that will let me create this shapefile, but I have yet
to find anything free or cheap. Maybe a solution is going to be to use a
plugin or something that will let me "draw" hotspots on top of my
bitmap. Again, if anyone knows of anything that will let me do this,
please drop me a line.
So far, I have botched the demo to include my raster as a background,
stripped out all the other layers except for the cities, and positioned
the raster in the same area as the cities (woo ! London in Minnesota ! )
the result is here : http://prx.upnorth.uk.com/ms/demo_init.html though
it may not stay for that long, but I am away this weeked riding in a
competition so it should be up for a bit. I presume these coordinates
represent somewhere in the US, on a scale that is worldwide ? One of the
places we board as it happens is in Greenwich park in the UK, the
location of the dateline. Is that gonna be 0 on one of the scales or is
it some US-Centric coordinates system ? I doubt that I will be using
coordinates in the final version to be honest, as real world coordinates
are unimportant to the system. I will just map everything to 0,0 I would
imagine...
Anyway, getting back to the point, if anyone knows of plugins etc that I
am likely to want to use, please let me know. Ideally I would like
something that changes the interface a little (Something where you can
drag a box to zoom in or right click to zoom out, with left clicking
activating hotspots would be lovely). I haven't quite got around to
sussing out how the hot spots on the map are going to be done, so if
anyone could give me any pointers to that, it would be lovely.
Thanks for your time
Clive "evilC" Galway