Recent posts

#1

General Chat / Re: Rss Feeds

Last post by Stephen Atty - Aug 09, 2026, 10:43 AM

The RSS feed for the forums is a bit odd

Atom works :

https://canalplan.org.uk/forums/.xml/??type=atom  which is what is behind the RSS button in the forum menu

which is also fed through feedburner at


https://feeds.feedburner.com/canalplan/vfynemznng8

I just haven't edited things to add it it to the forums

#2

General Chat / Rss Feeds

Last post by Shultzy - Aug 08, 2026, 08:35 PM

I'm able to capture the RSS feed for "New Contributions" from [http://feeds.feedburner.com/CanalPlanAC-WhatsNew] but the RSS feed for the CanalPlan Forums doesn't seem to have a similar url. The only ones I can find are [http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom] or [https://canalplan.org.uk/forums/.xml/?type=rss2] which don't seem to work. Any ideas?

#3

General Chat / Re: Saving an export route to ...

Last post by Stephen Atty - Jul 27, 2026, 07:50 PM

So you have this :

You should just be able to right click on the link and save it

#4

General Chat / Saving an export route to impo...

Last post by Mick - Jul 27, 2026, 07:15 PM

I have tried exporting a route and the file generated opens when i click the link however I cannot save it except by copying into notepad.  All looks Ok but errors when i import into basecamp or Mapsourse.  What am I doing wrong, I have used this feature before and I suspect having to copy into notepad it somehow changing the file?

#5

General Chat / Re: Adventures in coding!

Last post by Stephen Atty - Jun 18, 2026, 08:59 PM

Impressive - it is interesting that it takes the long way round brum - so increases the miles but takes the lock count down a long way

Trip info: Lockmiles 156 (116 miles and 40 locks.)


Total distance is 86 miles, 6¾ furlongs and 107 locks

#6

General Chat / Adventures in coding!

Last post by Aegidian - Jun 18, 2026, 03:04 PM

So...

I've been using canalplan's api for several years as the back end to my boat moving business's route planner. But it's always been a bit tricky, what with the lack of any official support (though the Attys have been brilliant when there have been problems) and with things occasionally going a bit wrong.

And it always felt like I was hammering their website a bit.

So, with some home time on my hands I bit the bullet and downloaded the geojson files, and used them as the basis for my own back end. And it was a TASK.

I had to translate the geojson into something smaller and more useful to me, since they are a bit too memory heavy for my ISP's php install (I ended up using Python as the basis for the backend instead, after struggling with this for a good while.)

Then the waterways had to be split up, so that they formed a graph with simple nodes and edges.

Then I had to implement A-Star route searches - which turned out to be easier in Python than I imagined, as it had 'heap' storage built in. Then optimising a ton of place searching algorithms for speed (yuk.)

It's pretty much done, after about six weeks of on-again-off-again tinkering. No more hammering the canalplan website for routefinding!

Tadaa: https://yourhelmsman.co.uk/trip.shtml

#7

Canalplan Site issues / Re: Identifying locks in data ...

Last post by FLHerne - Apr 27, 2026, 02:28 PM

I have done so -
https://canalplan.org.uk/bugtrack/view.php?id=1374

Sorry for the delay, the nice weather has had me painting a boat this week...

#8

Canalplan Site issues / Re: Identifying locks in data ...

Last post by Stephen Atty - Apr 19, 2026, 05:29 PM

Can you raise this as a bug/feature request.

#9

Canalplan Site issues / Identifying locks in data geoj...

Last post by FLHerne - Apr 18, 2026, 04:48 PM

I've been experimenting with using the geojson data for a personal project.

I had expected that filtering places with {"layer": "locks"}  would give me a complete set of locks, and it /almost/ does.
Unfortunately not quite though, for example this lock at Audlem is also tagged as having a milepost  which puts it into "layer: "features".

Code Select Expand

{
    "type":"Feature",
    "geometry": {
        "type":"Point",
        "coordinates":[-2.50950643793115,52.977414618419999]
    },
    "id":451117,
    "properties": {
           "title": "Audlem Lock No 17",
           "cp_id":"9o31",
           "icon":"cp-milepost",
           "layer":"facilities",
           "cp_rotate":0
    }
}

That seems to make it impossible to identify or label all locks from the data files - to determine which are actually locks it would be necessary to individually scrape each location page which would be antisocial.

In general a lot of information about places that I was hoping to use is omitted from the geojson data. Would it be possible to export a bit more?

Thanks,
Francis H

#10

Canalplan Site issues / Re: problem generating PDFs of...

Last post by Stephen Atty - Feb 26, 2026, 07:00 PM

I had it but they were turned on for me so I turned them off, did a save (permanent) and logged out and logged back in.

PDF code generation hasn't changed recently so not sure why this is happening.