I’ve been posting roughly four times a week on this blog, but that may slow down a bit over the next few months. After 10 hours of excavating in 100-degree temps (38-degree temps outside the US), it’s sometimes hard to summon the energy to write a post, and weekends are needed for recovery. I should still be able to get 2-3 posts up a week, and I’ll still shoot for 4, but if a week comes along with no posts, I hope you’ll understand. I should be able to resume a more normal schedule in September or October.
Archive for the 'blogkeeping' Category
The view from my deck this morning …
… and an unexpected guest for breakfast:
This blog turned one year old on January 12th, and I was going to do a one-year wrap-up. But given that it’s close enough to January 1st, I decided I’d just switch over to the same calendar year round-up that others have done recently; it’s easier to remember.
In 2007, this blog had:
- 384 posts (not including a few deleted ones)
- 426 legitimate comments (and close to 10,000 blocked spam comments)
- 319,645 visits from virtually every country on Earth (still waiting on Chad, North Korea, Western Sahara, and Turkmenistan :)
- 719,413 page views
- Close to 800 RSS subscribers at year-end (up a bit since then)
Thanks to all who dropped by; as always, I welcome your comments and suggestions. A special thanks goes out to those who showed their support for this blog with a PayPal donation; your contributions are greatly appreciated.
I added this blog to my blogroll not too long ago, but it’s good enough to get its own post. If you create a lot of KML files for public viewing, you should bookmark and visit Rich Treves’ Google Earth Design Blog on a regular basis. Good solid information on how to structure and present your data in Google Earth format, and a worthwhile companion to the Making Maps blog. Rich also has a nice set of video tutorials demonstrating how to add data to Google Earth in different formats (e.g. overlays, network links).
The GeoChalkboard Blog is a fairly new blog, “covering hands on exercises in Google Earth, Google Maps, ESRI, and Microsoft Virtual Earth technologies”, but most of its posts to date have dealt with Google Earth. It’s run by Geospatial Training Services, which offers paid computer-based courses for Google Earth and GIS software and technologies.
Slightly, but not completely, off-topic: I used to subscribe to the feeds for Engadget and Gizmodo, two blogs devoted to the latest and greatest in high-tech gizmos. But I dropped those feeds because:
- I was getting inundated with dozens of posts every day, most on items I had no interest in
- Too much “gadget porn”: drooling and obsessing over the latest and greatest in gimmickry without asking the questions, “Do we really need this?”, and “Is it really worth it?”
So now I’m down to one gadget blog, and the one I highly recommend: Cool Tools from Kevin Kelly, one of the creators of Wired Magazine. Why do I like it?
- Usually no more than one post a day.
- Talks about tools that actually do something useful or interesting.
- Not just the latest and greatest, but brings existing but obscure tools to your attention.
- Posts are thorough and thoughtful reviews, not just rehashed publicity releases.
- Not just computers or electronics, but a wide variety of topics: Aural, Autonomous Motion, Backpacking, Big Systems, Clothing, Communications, Community,Computers, Consumptivity, Craft, Culture, Design, Destinations, Dwelling, Edibles, Family, Gardens, General Purpose Tools, Health, Homestead, Inner Space, Kitchen, Learning, Life on Earth, Livelihood, Living on the Road, Materials, Media Tools, Paper World, Photography, Play, Science Method, Somatics, Source Wanted, Tips, Vehicles, Visual Media, Workplace. It’s fun just browsing through the different categories to see what you’ll stumble upon. No geography-related categories, but a search for “maps” or”GPS” will bring up a bunch of posts.
Give Cool Tools a look; I think you’ll like it.
I’m also keeping my eye on a newcomer, BoingBoing Gadgets; perhaps a bit too techy for my tastes, but does branch out beyond the standard electronics stuff.
John Krygier, Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio Wesleyan and co-author of the fantastic book on making maps called, oddly enough, Making Maps: A Visual Guide To Map Design For GIS, has recently revived his blog on the same topic at this link. Worth adding to your reading list if you’re interested in what makes a good map.
For those of you with both a website and OCD, there’s a service that will plot the location of visitors to your site in real-time on a Google Maps interface. Sign up at Statisfy.net (where you can also observe a real-time demo of Statisfy), and specify an ID for your site. They’ll email you a few lines of code to put in the body of your HTML, and a link to the site that will display hits on your site geographically as they occur. Here’s the link to the Free Geography Tools Statisfy map (and no, I don’t plan to spend a lot of time here; there’s not that much action :).
Over the years, I’ve been stumbling across a fair number of free (or cheap) geographical information tools for GIS and GPS applications. These range from full-blown GIS apps to simple utilities, and websites with both data and data services. Some of these are fairly well-known, others less so, and I’ve gotten a lot of good use out of them. Now I’ve decided to start regurgitating some of what I’ve picked up over the years, and start posting reviews, information and how-tos on this blog about where to get these tools, what they can do, and (sometimes) specific examples of how to use them.
While the websites will be OS-independent, the software I’ll be talking about will most often run only on Windows XP (though I’ll try to note if there are versions for other OSes as well). I’m not an OS snob, and if I were I wouldn’t be running Windows XP. But there are good reasons for concentrating on Windows applications:
- I have a Windows XP machine (several of them)
- I don’t have a Mac (but am willing to accept any donations).
- Every few years, I install the latest and hottest version of Linux on one of my systems, to see if it’s really ready to be my main desktop system; so far, the answer has been no. Ubuntu is getting close, though …
- There’s far more software available for Windows than there is for Mac and Linux; that’s not a comment on the quality of the OSes, just a fact of life.
Finally, some of the programs will be FOSS (free and open source), but a lot of them won’t be. If a program does a good job, I’m not going to discriminate against it just because it isn’t ideologically pure, especially if it doesn’t cost anything.
I welcome any and all comments, suggestions, recommendations, etc.. In particular, if there’s some GIS/GPS task that you’ve been looking for a solution for, let me know; I may know just what you’re looking for.
