Hey,

it’s summer and many of you are probably going on some exciting trips. Do you want to share your journey and adventures with others? Here is a simple way of doing it with www.mapbox.com.

Before we can actually start, you first have to register at the website above. No worries, it’s free if you stay under 50,000 map views/month which is really a lot, so you don’t have to worry unless you really have a lot of friends 🙂 Once you set up your account, we can start.

1. Create a new project

Simply navigate to Project and click on  + New project. The first thing you will be asked for, is to define a basemap. Mapbox comes with a lot of beautiful basemaps, you can see an overview below:

For our travelling map, I decided to go with the “Pirates” map.

2. Load data/draw lines and markers

The next step is to load data (the track of our trip) into our map. You can do this either with an actual GPS-Track of your trip or you can manually draw lines and add markers to your map. Here is a short desciption of both options:

1. Add GPS-Track

If you have a GPS device you can easily track your position and upload it to your computer. If you do not own such a device you might also use your cellphone: There are a lot of free apps out there that allow you to record your position and export it as a .gpx file to your computer. If you are an iPhone user I can for example recommend you the iMoves app.

Once you have your track ready, navigate to Data and just drag and drop your .gpx file into the window:

2. Draw lines/markers manually

Another way of visualizing your trip is to simply draw the track by hand. Again navigate to Data, but this time click on Marker or Line to add a waypoint or track:

With mapbox.com you can easily change the colors, symbols as well as the description text of your lines and markers.This way you can create your travelmap very fast and update it at every location you stop at.

3. Share map with others

Once you edited all your data, simply click on save and you will get a link that you can either embed in an HTML page or share with your friends per eMail. Here is a demo of a map I made depicting my way to work with a little detour to the ocean 🙂 Enjoy!