Category Archives: Blogs

So I moved my blog

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Fairly obvious I know but I moved my blog from wordpress hosting to being hosted on the same ISP as out family blog.

I did this for 2 reasons:

  1. We have a huge amount of space and I wanted the blog under my control
  2. I wanted to take advantage of GeoPress to show my location when writing the blog

GeoPress is something that Ed Parsons has been using for a long time now and to be honest I did not care about using it for the longest time as I like using Live Writer and GeoPress only really was useful for the web-based writing client. That has all changed now and you can tell GeoPress where you are in the world by embedding some meta-data in the post itself which will be interpreted and processed by the GeoPress plugin.

There are a few options:

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION(Location to be Geocoded)

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION(Pre-defined location – defined on the web version)

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION([lat,lon])

I have not decided which one to use as yet but I am thinking of writing a quick plugin to Live Writer that will allow me to search on (using Google), place a push-pin where I am and get a lat, lon back for it.

My other option is to use the GPS built into my phone (AT&T Tilt – great phone!) using a bluetooth connection and get the GPS coords from that. This is less likely as there is no way I will have enough satellites in the buildings where I am likely to be writing a blog entry!

Anyway, that’s really why I switched …. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://john.selkirks.net/?feed=rss2…. I am such a GIS geek it is unbelievable!

GEOPRESS_LOCATION(Home)

WordPress plugin of note

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I use WordPress for this blog (obvious from the URL I know!) and although I do not run my own version of it I do look at possible plugins from time to time.

These caught my eye this morning: http://wunder-ful.com/wordpress-plugins as it contains something that I wish I had on my blog .. date limits/ranges. There are scenarios where a blog is no longer relevant and should not be displayed in a feed or the blog page and WordPress has nothing to deal with this.

I tried the Posts Expire one on my own laptop  and it works like a charm. I hope that WordPress put this one in the core app at some point so I can use it on this blog.

Google Reader bound..

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I have been using Office Outlook 2007 to read RSS feeds for the past 6 months or so  – perhaps even more but after Robert Scoble time and time again has said that Google Reader rocks I decided to give it a try.

So for the past week or so I have been using Google Reader rather than Outlook and I am now going to make the move permanent. For the amount of feeds I currently read, Outlook is just not cutting it. 

Google Reader is really fast and the feeds render nicely. The interface is typical Google – clean, crisp and simple to use. 

When reading entries I normally try process them all but there are frequently entries which I would like to read but that are too verbose to get through at that time. In this scenario I would find myself launching a Firefox of the blog entry window just so that I could read it later. I don’t need to do this anymore as reader has the ability to ”star’ or flag and item and has a neat filtering mechanism were I can go back and view all of the entries that I have starred.

I believe that Outlook has a similar capability but I have never liked the way they flag stuff. In this case I do not want my feeds flagged in with the email I have flagged.

The reason why I looked back at reader in the first place (after discounting it when it came out) was that it now supports Google Gears. This means that with the click of a button I can take all of the feeds offline and read them on a plane. I spend a bunch of my time on planes and this out of all of the needs is my highest priority and why in the past I have selected Outlook over Google Reader.

Given that I am on planes often and unless the stars align and I am not upgraded to those nice seats, reader has one more trick up it’s sleeve. Keyboard shortcuts. You can navigate and read all of the feeds and entries by solely using the keyboard and it is so quick and easy to use that it is the only way that I interact with reader even when sitting at my desk.

Thanks Google for developing 2 pieces of technology (Reader and Gears) that make my life easier!

Decided to create a new blog about GIS

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Well it happened. I decided that a bunch of the things I am writing about have no place being on our family blog (mainly focused around Euan and what we do as a family) and Work (focused on only the technology used and created at TC Technology).This is a good thing. People have RSS aggregators and software to read these feeds anyway so they are not visiting multiple websites these days.Watch this space for some thoughts that I have in the GIS community mainly around development in the GIS world but also some external GIS influences!