Linking to a Slippy Map, showing custom markers

Hi OSM,

I would like to display several small map renders on my website, showing how to find places (venues for local concerts). Ideally I’d allow the users to click on the ‘static’ map renders and be taken to a Slippy Map like the OSM homepage, or informationfreeway.org. However, both on the ‘static’ map render, and on the Slippy Map, I’d like to be able to mark the place of interest.

I’ve seen similar things done on Google Maps, using thumb-pin icons which can be clicked to show a label. But I’m very interested in the OSM project. I’d enjoy mapping the areas and marking the position of the relevant locations in OSM.

What I’m after isn’t really an overlay where multiple places are highlighted on the map; I’m mainly interested in highlighting only a single location at a time.

I can easily create the ‘static’ map renders, for which I’d just grab some OSM data, convert to SVG and then probably to JPEG. I can then imprint my own marker over the top.

As for the Slippy Maps, I imagine something like &mark_lat=&mark_lon&mark_label= to append to a permalink URL would be nice. Do any existing Slippy Maps have this feature, or would they be willing to implement it? Otherwise, should I create and host my own Slippy Map and implement the feature myself? (although I have very limited bandwidth)

Thanks!

You can link to the openstreetmap.org map and display a marker like this
http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=52&lon=-1.5&zoom=12&mlat=52.01&mlon=-1.49

It’s also possible to embed a slippery map interface on you site that uses tile images served from another site. Currently the openstreetmap hosted map tiles can be used on an external site. This wiki page has a bit of info.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Deploying_your_own_Slippy_Map

I think the first option sounds like the easiest way of doing things for now (though it’s a shame I can’t place custom text beside the marker to say what it points to).

In the future I might go for the second option, and host my own Slippy Map which locks zoom and pan to the local area. This would hopefully minimize the required bandwidth, so I might be able to host my own modified tiles which label well-known ‘landmarks’ to aid someone in finding the place of interest. Alternatively I could use the OSM.org-hosted tiles and have my Slippy Map somehow draw my labels over the top (similarly to how the marker works on OSM.org).

Thanks for these good suggestions.