Back at the Developer Summit, I talked to quite a few people about blogs and blogging in general, and many times they would say – “I like to read the GIS blogs, but don’t have time to visit each site every day”. To which I would suggest using a RSS Reader to automatically aggregate the blogs you are interested in. I also said I would post about this – thus this post.

So – ever wonder what those little and images meant? They are the key to recieving content from web sites with out actually visiting them via a browser. These icons link to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is simply the content (usually blogs or forum postings) in a specific format of Xml. This Xml is readable by – you guessed it – RSS Readers.

There are a wide array of RSS Readers out there – some online (live.com, BlogLines.com) and some are desktop based. Personally, I use RSS Bandit. It’s easy to use, it’s free, and it’s written in .NET. It can also use a variety of methods to synchronize readers on multiple machines (i.e. Home & Work). Finally – since I do travel from time to time, it’s nice to have a reader that can be used offline – as in on a plane.

Once you have your RSS Reader, the next step is to load some feeds into it. There are a couple of ways to do this – first would be to visit each blog or discussion forum you are interested in, and load each one into your reader. This is how most people do it. However, there is another option – download an OPML file – which is essentially an Xml file that contains a list of RSS Feeds.

For example – take ArcDeveloper.net – this site has 6 blogs and 13 discussion forums. If you wanted to track everything going on over there, you could manually load up each RSS feed into your reader. Or you could grab the ArcDeveloper.net OPML file which contains all of them.

ArcDeveloper.net.opml (3.87 KB)

That’s just a quick run down on using RSS Feeds to simplify your blog reading.

Given the drop in GIS interwebs, I guess Spring has come and people, myself included, have better things to do than pecking away at their keyboard in the evening.

Actually I’ve been crazy busy with my little boy and work. He’s learning to hold his head up, and we’ve just kicked off two more projects at work:

The first is using ArcGIS 9.1 / .NET 2.0 / ArcSDE / Oracle to build a forest managment system, including a Growth and Yeild modelling module (temporal data = fun!). This is in the requirements phase, so it’s all about documentation at
this point. Thus I’m doing conference calls and writing use cases for the next few weeks.

The other is using ArcGIS Server to create a web service to build on-demand pdf maps for a series based on the 1:100k quad sheets. This one is in the design phase, so it’s sequence diagrams, and class models for a week or so.

Once we’re past these two documentation phases – then we’ll be coding, and I’d expect more technical posts.

Beside these projects, we are also switching over to Team System for all our process managment & source control needs, so I’m sure I’ll post some stuff on that. Perhaps tommorrow…

I had a few minutes this evening, and I was able to get LightBox 2.0 working with the photo albums on my main site.

This was really easy once I got the pathing all sorted out – themes and masterpages kinda throw a little complexity in to the mix.

In order to reference the lightbox next,previous and close images (not the photos) in my /images folder from my css file in my theme, the relative path had to be “../../images/blah.gif” – makes sense in hind sight, but not totally obvious to start.

Also – adding the scripts into the page was a little weird. On my home box, I could use

Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptInclude(Page.ResolveClientUrl(”./js/lightbox.js”));

but that would not do anything on my server. I ended up simple changing it to:

Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptInclude(”../js/lightbox.js”);

and it worked just fine.

I think it’s a much nicer way to view the photos – and easier for my extended family! Kudos to Lokesh at HuddleTogether.com

This edition of the Denver Developer User Group was much better, and not just because I gave a breif chat about ArcDeveloper.net & ArcUnit!

Things started off with a quick round of introductions – name, affiliation, what you are doing with ArcGIS, and I was quite suprised at how many groups were seriously looking at switching a lot of GIS functionality over to ArcGIS Server. Very cool!

The ESRI Denver guys, (Chris, Tom, and Jeremiah) did a session on setting up and installing ArcGIS server. Now this seems like a somewhat dull topic until you actually try to install it. Then you realize that, yes, you do need to think about what’s going on more than any other ESRI product. They even had a common “gotcha” occur.

Tom (running the demo) had added his domain account to the local “ArcGIS Server Admin” group, and then tried to connect to ArcGIS Server via Catalog, and it threw an error stating he did not have permission to access the resource. After checking that the service was running, someone in the audience reminded him that he needed to log out and log in before his account would “know” about the group change. This is exactly the sort of thing that can make installing and configuring AGS a confusing process. Unless you are installing on a development box, I’d highly suggest having a little Active Directory / Windows managment under your belt, or involve a system admin.

After than, Bryan Dickerson of Woolpert gave a review of a number of ArcGIS Server projects that they have done. Bryan is a system & software architect, so it was a good – non-marketing – talk about how all the parts work together. He concentrated a fair bit on how to use the right software in the right place – when to use ArcGIS Server vs ArcIMS, and how to blend them.

I believe his presentation, along with my few slides, and Tom/Jeremiah’s Installing ArcGIS Server slide decks will be on the ESRI Denver site in the next day or so.

Also of note – if you’re in the Denver area, and want to present at one of these, Chris Longo in the Denver office is the man to talk to.

Tomorrow (April 6,2006), ESRI is holding another Developer User Group meeting at the Denver office. Last time I was not overly impressed by the content presented, but I think things will be much better this time.

Skill Level: Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced

This Developer

User Group will focus on ArcGIS Server in the .Net environment. We will start by taking a brief look at the ArcGIS Server architecture followed by users case studies. These will be highlighting specific projects and explore success and pitfalls in the development process. We will conclude the session with a Q & A along with various .Net and ArcGIS Server users.

Additionally, I’ll be giving a short (5-10 minute) intro to ArcDeveloper.net, the ArcUnit project, and throw out the idea of a Northern Colorado ESRI Developer User Group to see what the level of interest is.

If you’re in the Fort Collins area, and would like to see a user group up here, let us know – go to ArcDeveloper.net and post in the “ArcDeveloper.net forum“.

I’ll post tomorrow with a run-down of how it all went.

The .NET Chicken saw the pictures of the Java Chicken posted on James‘ blog, and is now on strike – demanding a workstation with 3 monitors, more post-it notes AND a cool globe.

Currently the .NET Chicken just has two flat screens and a lousy inflatable globe that leaks air. On the upside, we just switched him to Team System, and he has a mountain view, but apparently that’s not going to cut it.

He claims he will not peck out another line of C# until the situation is addressed. This has quite distressed the other plasticised-signed-by-software-guru animals we have working in the office, although none have elected to join his strike.

Managment is holding tough on this and is threatening a lockout. I’ll keep posting information as the situation evolves…