Just in time for a fun filled weekend, Mapnik 2.1 has been release. There are a ton of great new features so there will be much to play with. As I mentioned during the hangout with Gretchen last week, I love the fine grained control of authoring maps using style files vs proprietary GUI wackiness. I honestly don’t see how if you truly care about cartography, you can continue to author maps using methods that are akin to using FrontPage to author HTML pages. It’s OK when you are making a webpage for your cat, but you can’t assume people will continue to pay you to click your mouse.

Well it’s either play with Mapnik or go crazy!