Some useful tools for making maps

Leaflet.js is a JavaScript library primarily for making web maps. You can display raster or vector tiles and if you have a geoJSON data set you can layer those guys on your tiles.

Mapbox.js allows you to do a bunch of jam that's a bit more customizable than leaflet and marketed as an extension of it. I don't think it's as lightweight though, but I need to ask someone who knows what they're talking about.

Mapbox Editor is a GUI interface more immediately accessible than tilemill and Mapbox.js. Based on the work Mapbox did with iD (the editor for OSM), it supports data import in many flavors and supports polygons, line features, as well as embedding and exporting capabilities.

Add data to Open Steet Map and improve your (and mine and everyone's) access to open geodata about our world!

Need a simple place to deal with your geodata, or attach non geo data to geo data, CartoDB is perfect for you. Plus there're some really straight forward wizards for making that data into geo visualizations.

So a lot of the geovisualization non google map things hitting the web are extentions of d3(Data Driven Documents). D3 is great at plotting data and has many geo extensions which make it easy to plot coordinates attached to that data as well. Can be a bit of a learning curve but with some JavaScript, CSS and HTML experience you should be able to figure out how to do some cool stuff with .csv's and .json docs filled with numbers.

Eh google maps, they explain a lot at google, use if you're boring (or want a great looking quick and relatively easy to use JavaScript map API). Google Map Engine lite looks like it's replacing MyMaps as an easy way to add markers and draw lines and polygons on a map. It is very easy to use with Google Fusion Tables.

Qgis v2 is great as long as you don't have to edit geojson datasets (but you can always convert em'). It also might not have all the design tools a cartographer dreams about but it it an amazing GUI for using GDAL and doing lots of spatial analysis operations and working with a wide range of types of data (so long as it's geocoded).

A desktop application from Mapbox, Tilemill is great for styling datasets especially if you have at least a little background in CSS. You actually end up styling you're layers through CartoCSS. This tool is ideal for creating base layers of custom web maps. You can show off your map by simply uploading it to mapbox as (mbtiles- an sqlite modification from what I understand) and/or using a library like leaflet.js or mapbox.js to show it off on the internets

With the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library you can manipulate all kinds of datatypes and projections into other ones. You do kind of need some proficiency working out of the command line (terminal). I think I often get around this by using Qgis, which I think uses GDAL for a lot of under the hood stuff.

For java afficionado's out there OpenJUMP looks like a basic desktop GIS package which as been extended and is supposedly easilly extendable if you know how java works. I still have yet to use it but the logo rocks and from what I can tell it can do lots of basic geospatial operations.

I can't afford ESRI's expensive licensing and I'm no longer a student. So give me a job if you want me to update this section.

Color Brewer is one of the most widely used tools for people choosing colors to put on their maps. Very useful for both general colors which will stand out and for creating scales.

So I found this on Gregor Aisch's Driven by Data blog and if you're into colors I think he and others used javascript to make cool ways to choose color combos, espcially helpful creating scales.

Noun project houses the results of iconothons and makes them available to everyone. Many of them with open licenses but you always have the option to donate a little $ to any of the awesome designers who contribute.

Mapboxers have made maki icons which as of my writing this are 106 point of interest icons which come in three sizes to fit all your zoom level needs.

An ongoing project by the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State Symbol Store is a collection of over 1200 map symbols. By default they are ESRI style files but can be converted and used in most GIS software. The Maki icons from Tilemill and may third party sources are aggregated here.

lvoogdt (github handle) has put together Leaflet.awesome-markers plugin v2.0 to make it easy to have a little creative control over your markers without having to do too much work.

Natural Earth has a number of free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, 1:110m resolutions.

OpenStreetMap.org makes all of their data available for export but there is a limit on the amount of data you can export a one time so the servers are available for everyone. Lots of people make metro extracts and other commonly used data available for download in various formats. Search engines are your friend discovering these as they vary depending on your need.

WeoGeo provides a number of geo datasets for free and also will provide more obscure or personalized data on request but that usually comes with a fee. Check out there site for more info.

There are a number of Government Data Portals which provide geo datasets. Like the federal one at data.gov and there are a number of municipal ones like San Francisco's. Google can probably help you locate the one you need if it exists.

For access to over 10 million geographic names w/ coordinates check out www.geonames.org. Best part is it's all free to use as long as you attribute them! So feel free to integrate it into that geodatabase you're agrregating to share with me.'