More color, prettier links, and less swimming
By popular demand, I’m starting a regular series of posts summarizing the changes taking place in openstreetmap-website – the main OSM website and API. I trawled the many merged pull requests and commits from March 16 to today, distilling them into a hopefully more digestible list. Since the community here is mostly mappers and other casual website users rather than coders, I’ve mostly focused on user-facing changes.
In the future, I’ll continue posting the updates to this thread roughly monthly. Please subscribe to this thread if you want to keep getting updates, or mute it if you already follow the osm-website project closely enough that I’d be insulting your intelligence.
Before I begin, I have a small request: if you have any feedback about an individual change described here, please start a new thread about it. To do this, select the bullet point you want to respond to, click ❝ Quote or press Q, click the 
button next to my name, and click 
Reply as linked topic. That way, I’ll be able to reuse this thread without spamming the forum category. Thanks for your consideration.
Without further ado…
Slippy map
- The Map Key panel explains the CyclOSM layer’s route overlay colors.
- If you install the OSM website as a progressive Web application, it registers as a protocol handler for the geo URI scheme.
- In the Map Layers panel, the Map Data checkbox shows a spinner while data is being downloaded from the API.
Directions
- Directions from OSRM once again mention if a step requires you to board a ferry. You weren’t going to swim, were you?
- A new toggle at the top of the Directions panel lets you switch distances between kilometers and miles. I see some smiles from our British friends, who’ve been asking, “¿por qué no los dos?” It’s also a step in the right direction for Americans like me who measure distances in, uh, hours. (Say, can we add a smoots option for those attending State of the Map U.S. in Boston next month?)
History
- We refreshed the map overlays on the main History page. The map can start to get crowded with bounding boxes after you load several pages’ worth of additional changesets. Now the bboxes are color-coded by age based on the sidebar’s scroll position. The scroll position also determines which bboxes you can select on the map, so that the newer changesets you saw initially won’t get in the way of selecting older changesets you’ve since loaded.
- If you position the map to straddle the antimeridian, all the relevant bboxes now appear, on both sides of the antimeridian. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in monitoring Taveuni, this bug fix makes the map useful when you zoom out to see the whole world multiple times over.
- While you play around with the new overlays, you might notice that the
before=orafter=URL parameter is synchronized with the scroll position. You can use these parameters to jump directly to a long-ago slice of history instead of spending a whole afternoon loading 20 changesets at a time. (I’ve done this. Do not recommend.) - We corrected the license of the history Atom feed: ODbL, not CC BY-SA.
User accounts
- The Log In screen warns you if you’re already logged in. This is useful if you use Firefox Multi-Account Containers with the homepage in one container and your editor in another container.
- On the Edit Profile page, you can set a home location name to appear in the summary line of your user profile.
- Each cell in the contribution calendar is colored relative to your personal best rather than by an absolute threshold of changesets. Clicking the cell opens a list of the changesets created that day.
- We fixed an issue where users in the Western Hemisphere saw a contribution calendar incorrectly offset by one month. Time zones are hard!
- Some page titles and section headings related to following users are more grammatical.
Editors
- We upgraded iD to version 2.33.0, then v2.34.0. Both versions come with a number of improvements.
- When editing in iD, the page title says “iD” followed by the name of the feature currently selected in iD. This makes your iD window or tab easier to distinguish from the homepage.
Diaries
- The Users’ Diaries page and other chronological diary entry listings truncate each entry so you can navigate the page more easily.
- If your Web browser supports it, the bottom of each diary entry now includes a button that opens your operating system’s built-in sharing options.
Other user-facing changes
- Any www.openstreetmap.org or wiki.openstreetmap.org URL is automatically shortened to osm.org or osm.wiki, respectively.
- When viewing a changeset’s metadata, common keys such as
host=*once again link to the associated key description pages on the wiki. - If you use the website in a right-to-left language (such as Arabic or Hebrew), text in a left-to-right language is laid out correctly and vice versa, no longer placing punctuation on the wrong end of each line in Markdown-formatted content.
- In Chrome on a mobile device, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears immediately on the New Note screen, obscuring the map and preventing you from adjusting the note’s location.
For data consumers
- Did you know we no longer require your OSM attribution notice to contain a copyright symbol (©)? We updated the Copyright and License page to reflect current best practices for attribution. In case you link “OpenStreetMap” to this page (in order to call attention to the ODbL, as required), the page starts out with a brief description of OSM and links to learn more.
- The OSM API’s /api/0.6/user/gpx_files endpoint can return JSON output.
For developers
- openstreetmap-website is built with Rails 8.
You can help!
Thanks to recurring contributors @amire80, andy_allan, anton_khorev, @benutzer, danieldegroot2, @David_Tsiklauri, @hlfan, @holgerjeromin, @karussell, kcne, rkoeze, TomH, @trickyfoxy, and @tyr_asd for these and other changes that are less visible but no less important. And a special welcome to first-time contributors @harel_m, @neatnit, and Valchee!
If you’re familiar with some of the technologies the site uses, like Rails or JavaScript, we have a large backlog of outstanding pull requests that you can help review informally, helping the maintainers assess which ones are most ready to land. Occasionally we tag an issue as a good first issue, which means it’s well-defined and doesn’t require much background knowledge. If you don’t have a coding background but speak a language other than English, help us translate the website and other OSM software into your language.
This list of changes is pretty long, and maybe you were surprised to see some of it landing now. Over the coming months, I’ll be working with maintainers to articulate a roadmap for this and other core software projects, so you’ll have a general idea of the larger things we want to prioritize. Your feedback as community members will be crucial to putting together a useful roadmap.
How are we doing?
If you have any feedback that isn’t quite formulated well enough for an actionable GitHub issue, feel free to reach out to me directly via a private message on this forum or osm.org, or e-mail me at minh@[the OSMF domain]. (I also lurk on a few chat platforms.) My formal role as CSDF will focus on often underappreciated infrastructure, but even if you’re interested in something more user-facing, I can at least try to connect you to the right people in the community.
I’d also appreciate feedback about this post in the meta discussion about keeping track of changes. Are these bullet points putting you to sleep? Do I need to explain the changes in more detail? Would you also like to hear about non-user-facing changes such as refactoring and unit test coverage?