I had not heard of TopOSM before today, I just wanted to express my amazement. Your renderings are absolutely beautiful!

Wilkommen!

The NCN= stuff is only for rendering on the cyclemap. If you tag is as a cycleway, it will show up as a dotted line in mapnik.

There is also

http://forum.openstreetmap.org/

You might want to look through the wiki for directions for installing mapnik, and all the database bits.

I think most of what you need to know is in the Deploying your own slippymap article.

Welcome!

See the wiki page on out of copyright maps for ideas on using arbitrary images.

You basically import the image file, give the coordinates for two points in the image, then you can trace things and export the traces as GPX files, which you can open in JOSM to edit with.

The main map is re-rendered approximately weekly, so it may take a few days for your efforts to show up. If you click the little "+" on the upper right of the map, and select "osmarender" you will see a slightly different version of the map which is (generally) rendered a few hours after the change is made.