GreenAsh

All-natural web development

GreenAsh is a one-man show, based in Sydney Australia and run by Jeremy Epstein (Jaza). GreenAsh specialises in developing web sites that take care of themselves. Our favourite tool is an open source web Content Management System called Drupal, which we use to build sites that virtually anyone can update, and that your visitors can interact with.

GreenAsh contains no artificial preservatives (e.g. applets), no artificial sweeteners (e.g. Flash), and no artificial colours (e.g. ActiveX). It will not harm your unborn baby (like table-based layouts do). It is 100% clean and semantic, all-natural HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. However, It may contain traces of [web developers who are slightly] nuts.

This site is where I write about the thoughts in my head, where I offer online resources, and where I advertise my skills and services.

Fresh thoughts

Haiti coverage in OpenStreetMap vs Google Maps

Thursday, 11 March, 2010.

I was recently reading about how OpenStreetMap has been helping the Haiti relief effort, in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti's capital back in January. Being one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, Haiti's map coverage is very poor. However, a group of volunteers have radically changed that, and this has directly helped the aid effort on the ground in Haiti.

To see just how effective this volunteer mapping effort has been, I decided to do a quick visual comparison experiment. As of today, here's what downtown Port-au-Prince looks like in Google Maps:

Port-au-Prince in Google Maps What Haiti's capital looks like in Google Maps.