Blog

Link – Mapdex ArcMap Toolbar

As if Iqbal, in my group, just finished developing an ArcMap toolbar plugin for Mapdex. This ArcMap extension will allow you to search Mapdex directly from within ArcMap. I think it is pretty powerful. It makes use of the soon to be released Mapdex REST interface.

Looks interesting to me. Finding web services is one of the hardest things to do these days and integrating one of the only tools that can do it, Mapdex, into ArcGIS should help increase their usage, plus integrated into ArcGIS should improve workflows. Click through to the article to sign up for the beta.

Link – ArcNews

A perfect example to why quarterly publications aren’t valuable anymore is the latest ArcNews. The ESRI rss feed sums it up perfectly, “User Conference highlights and Image Server news among the top stories”. Both topics are important, but quite dated. If ArcNews was more relevant to current news the top stories should be ArcWeb 2006 and the ArcGIS Visual Studio .NET Integration Framework. ArcWeb is in the issue, but the announcement that Public ArcWeb services are available, YIKES! Oh well, maybe by March we’ll get some ESRI Katrina stories.

I would think this publication would be of more value if it was dropped as a print ‘newspaper” and became a online magazine updated as ESRI product news happens.

There has been some problems with Planet Geospatial over the last month both on the html page and with the feeds. I finally gave up trying to handle all the html and are now stripping it out (except for link tags). I’ve also decided to use FeedBurner as it seems to do better than either of the two feeds that I was using before. For most RSS readers, the change should be transparent, but some might want to update the feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/PlanetGeospatial. I’ve tried this in Yahoo!, Google Reader, Newsgator, RSS Owl, Bloglines and Feedster. If you see trouble, let me know, but I’m hopeful this should end all the problems Planet Geospatial has had (I just asked the Magic 8-ball and it told me that it will work so I’m confident).

Also, Sean Gillies has updated his Greasemonkey script which removes feeds from Planet Geospatial that don’t interest you. This version should be pretty stable as I have no plans to change Planet Geospatial since it is working with all browsers and all major RSS readers.

Link – ArcWeb Services

I went to login to my ArcWeb Services account this morning and low and behold I was forwarded to the ArcWeb 2006 page. The main ESRI ArcWeb page doesn’t seem to be updated, but as far as I can tell it should be soon. There are many new and cool features in 2006 that I’ll try and go into during the day, but many will want to take special note of the new REST support. A short week means I have to squeeze 40 hours of work into 24 hours of time (why does it never work in the reverse), but I’m going to spend some time playing over the Thanksgiving Day weekend with Public ArcWeb Services and REST.

Update – It looks like it isn’t totally available yet as the ArcWeb Explorer demo isn’t up, but I suspect we’ll be seeing this sometime this week.

Link – Hurricane Disaster Viewer

Looks like Tropical Storm Gamma is working its way toward Florida.

Link – Flash Macromedia Components for ArcIMS

Using Macromedia Flash seems to be the hot item these days, so why not bail on the HTML viewer in ArcIMS and create your own Flash front end. There are some nice examples on the developer website and even a SWF file you can download and point to your own IMS server to test it out. I suspect we’ll be seeming much more Flash now that Yahoo! and ESRI are using it on their web based mapping services.

Well my trip to the high desert is finally over. From China Lake to El Centro I ended hitting all the hot spots. Anyway, I got lots of email I need to respond to so anyone who has sent an email, please be patient. Also, I’m going to be totally be redoing Planet Geospatial as there have been some big problems with the feed and the webpage itself. I’ve got a good idea (well the last change to Planet Geospatial was supposedly a good idea) on how to improve it.

Anyway, its good to be back home sitting on the couch and watching House of Mouse with my son (except I just realized it is only Thursday, not Friday), damn.

Link – GIS Day

Well GIS Day is upon us and I’m going to spend it up in the High Desert of California visiting some clients. Hopefully some of you will find some time to visit a local GIS Day event in your area.

Link – Monkeying with Planet Geospatial

Pgeofilter will scrub the Planet Geospatial front page of entries from a single blog. You will need to make one edit to the code to specify that blog. Note that with a little cut and paste you could hack this script to filter several blogs. Please note that this script is aimed at the mid-November incarnation of Planet Geospatial. I’m using it to filter out the echoes on Planet Geospatial; the blogs which simply link to each other without providing any original content.

I just love Greasemonkey. The simplicity of how it works just amazes me. If you’ve wanted to filter out some feeds on the Planet Geospatial site, now its as easy as using Firefox and Greasemonkey.

I spent most of the day at ESRI’s Redlands Campus talking with some members of the ArcGIS Server team as well as getting some demos of new software ESRI plans to release in the next few months (signed a NDA so I can’t say much of anything). Bascially throw out what you think you know about ESRI’s server products and prepare to be amazed. There are some well thought out ideas and concepts that will help all GIS Professionals. I’m excited and soon you will be too.