My map looked so good in the QField app that I thought it might be nice to build a web map, one that could be generally available rather than part of a very specialized app. And rather than doing it from scratch, I decided to try some of the QGIS plugins.
My first try was with the QGIS Cloud plugin. I’d used this before (verdict: meh), but I still had an account so I decided to give it another try. Verdict is still “meh” but I did get a web map out of it, check it out here. This looks as good as my QField map, which isn’t surprising since it’s basically my original project running on QGIS Cloud’s servers, but this setup came with a lot of latency: the map takes a while to redisplay after every move or resizing. It also had some trouble showing my location when I first launched it on my phone (it worked fine on the laptop) but this problem eventually resolved itself — it might have been a permissions issue, and I might have solved it by pressing random buttons…
The other plugin I tried is called qgis2web, which builds a local web map using the standard Leaflet or OpenLayers javascript libraries. This sounded like a great approach, but as soon as I ran the plugin, it crashed QGIS — doh!
It turns out that qgis2web can only work with very simple feature styling: lines (for instance) can be dotted or solid but not a mix, and can only be one color, while my trails were dotted lines in one color, drawn on wider solid lines in another color…
So, I created yet another Sals sub-project, with a subset of my map’s features (just trails and roads, streams, and trailheads) and a much-simplified symbology. Just for fun I tried building an OpenLayers map, since I’d never used OpenLayers before. It came out great, and though it doesn’t look as fancy as the QGIS Cloud map it loads/runs much faster. I put this one online as well, you can find it here.
Meanwhile, Ben and Jenny arrived yesterday for their Christmas visit, and today we went for a hike at Sals. I used my QField app to record a bunch of marker posts — I didn’t want to turn the hike into a “Don plays with his maps” debacle, so I didn’t break out either of my new web maps. But capturing the data in QField was a snap, and incorporating it into my main project was mostly seamless, and I’d guess I now have about half of the total number of markers added.
And that means that my two new web maps are already out of date…
