Hard to believe Spatially Adjusted gets it’s driver learners permit next year, but it’s true. Hard for me to believe that I was sitting on a ranch outside Brownwood, TX (on AOL dialup no less) thinking about how to learn more about open source GIS software. For reasons I cannot remember, I thought why not blog about it. This blog has been in my life for so long I really can’t recall what I did before I had it. But hey, I’m so happy to have written all these blog posts, even the bad ones, because I have learned so much.
Me taking the time to post only the best ideas…
I can’t even imagine what the next 15 years will be like, but we’ll leave that up to the future. While I don’t post here as much as I used to, feel free to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, where I attempt to keep up with my off base opinions.
I’ve spent the last week cleaning up old blog posts. You won’t see them live just yet, I have a dev version of this blog that I’ve been playing around with. What I’ve done is search all posts for any links that don’t go 200 and then either attempt to find a corresponding version in the Way Back Machine or if a source doesn’t exist (using CSS) make a modification to the post indicating that the link is no longer valid.
Touching 2400 blog posts is dangerous stuff…
I’m also cleaning up the categories and tags which I think have little value anymore. I think at one point people subscribed to tags/categories in a blog, but search really has taken that over. So the complexity of tagging or categorizing posts really doesn’t make sense. I mean I like to think someone is coming to my blog and saying, “Hey look there, he’s got a category for Virtual Earth” but I seriously doubt it.
I’m also playing around with AWS Lightsail. I’ve been using it for this dev version of the blog and I might try it with production. Linode seems to be cheaper, but I like having more of my things on AWS rather than a little bit all over the place.
I hope to push up the changes to the blog here this week. I really feel that given I have almost 2400 blog entries with over 400,000 words. Checking old blog posts has really shown me how much we’ve lost. So many people, blogs and information has been lost forever. This is a shame because I learned so much by reading what others had written. I hope that while not every one of those 400,000 words has value, the majority of this blog helps people and in turn, preserving what I’ve written will always be a priority.
I had to have written something at some point worth saving…
This blog is dedicated to the integration between GIS and enterprise level relational databases. I am a Geographer by trade with a strong interest in relational databases. I have been in the GIS field for 10+ years and the database field for 7. The amount of data waiting to be spatially enabled within enterprise databases is extraordinary. I hope to show in this blog working examples of database-GIS interaction. Many examples that I will show are implemented within Oracle 9.2 and ESRI’s SDE 8.3. Hopefully most of the SQL algorithms will transfer to your implementation.
Jeremy over at Mapdex has let us know about a new blog he’s put together about GIS and relational databases. He’s already posted twice and if these entries are any indication it will be a real treat. Great job Jeremy!
Modern mapmaking now starts with GIS data from state or local government that includes way more information than you really want. The task nowadays is to remove the unwanted data from the map to reduce clutter and focus on the desired information. One of the tasks these Illustartor users have is to create linked networks of nodes to create the streets and highways we see on a map.
Andrew Hallam posted to thank Jithen Singh for letting the world know about a technical paper on ArcGIS server. He also makes the great point of how blogs gave him information that he normally would not have gotten from ESRI because of their confusing support site. While it is true that they have a “Support Notifications” registration site that will send out emails for this kind of information, I’ve noticed that many new documents show up without being included in the weekly email. What needs to happen is RSS feeds for practically ever section of the support site. I should be able to subscribe to the ArcIMS RSS Feed and get all new documents as they appear, not wait until the get included in an email that my Outlook always seems to label as Junk Mail (no matter what I do with its settings). I’ve heard again and again from ESRI staff about how the support site is held together with duct tape, but something has to give and soon over more RSS feeds.
Oh and would someone over at ESRI make Jei some sort of MVP? (or just send him some t shirt that said GIS Geek on it) He’s pretty much deserved some kind of recognition given all he’s done over on the other side of the world.
Well honestly I don’t know how many versions of Hobu.biz there have been (I’m sure more than 2), but the style of the times is to put 2.0 after everything new. Howard’s blog has had more than a makeover and it looks really professional. Could he be getting ready for the next podcast interview?
Those RSS feeds are pretty slick on the side. And it has given me an idea to finally roll out something I’ve been playing with. Check back this weekend and maybe if my kitchen remodel is done I’ll post about it.
Just as the blogroll is now dynamically updated, so is my OPML file for that list. If you ever want to download it, just click on the little orange link just to the right of the ESRI Bloggers or GIS Blogs titles.
I’ll probably be cleaning out a couple blogs that haven’t been updated in the past few months so expect the list to go down somewhat.
I’ve updated my blogroll again and I’m going to try using the Newsgator service again. The last time I did this it didn’t work, but it seems like all the kinks are out of the system. What is cool is that rather than me manually adding and deleting feeds, this will automatically be updated as my Newsgator Outlook and FeedDemon readers change. I’ve been testing it on the side and it seems to be fine. Let me know if anything seems out of wack. I’ll try and get the OPML files for the ESRI bloggers and the GIS bloggers as a download by the end of the week (also dynamic) so if you want to just import them you can.
