Big website update:

The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference brings together the people who create, use, and support open spatial software. No other event brings together members of the open source development, open data creation, and open standards promotion communities like FOSS4G -- it is truly a "meeting of the tribes".

I am usually critical of OSGeo, but cannot deny that every statement on that welcome page is true.

[Rumors that Kirok will deliver the keynote to the tribes are untrue.]

The line about meeting of tribes is groan-inducing -- and you won't actually get to witness the GeoServer developers and GRASS developers ceremonially brew coffee around a hooka -- but there really is a pervasive, fun community spirit at these conferences. If you're looking to learn more about the universe of open source GIS and open data initiatives, or have something that you're pushing forward, you should go to Victoria this Fall for the total immersion experience.

GeoCarta's Roger Hart just reminded me of something I miss: the Great Salt Lake. Follow the links through his blog to the USGS's new bathymetric maps of my favorite little inland sea. Back in the day, I fished for perch and sailed in Gunnison Bay. Evaporation from the lake contributes to the annual 500" of snow dumped on Alta. Sea Monkies (Artemia franciscana) frolic in the smelly, briny compartment south of the railroad causeway. The modern lake is a remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville, which suddenly poured into the Snake River about 14,000 years ago. Estimates of the flow during the flood event are as high as 33 million cubic feet per second.

The image to the left of ancient and modern lake levels is from an online class at the University of Utah.

The software that runs this blog has been letting me down. After some consideration, I decided that instead of switching or rolling my own, I'd be like the guy who soups up his Ford Pinto wagon (COREBlog in my case). New wheels, new paint, and tinted glass. Later, maybe, new seats and sound system.

On the programming side of the upgrade: new, permanent, hackable, readable, and indexable URLs. The old URLs, formed like:

http://sgillies.net/blog/{id}

sucked. There's just no way around that. They were hackable in that you could increment or decrement the id to get subsequent or previous entries, but had no other virtues unless you count (and I did for a while) their extreme shortness as a virtue. Now, the URLs are changed to:

http://sgillies.net/blog/{id}/{slug}/

Keeping the id guarantees uniqueness and preserves hackability. A slug derived from the entry title -- in this particular case "Blog Upgrade" -> "blog-upgrade" -- provides a tiny bit of context to aid web surfers and indexers. I changed not a thing in the ZODB. All I've done is reimplement __bobo_traverse__() for COREBlog.Entry so that the proper object gets published on a slug-ged request, and reimplement index_html() for the same class to redirect to the new canonical URL. If an agent comes for a deprecated URL, it gets a status 301 response with the new location:

sean@lenny:~$ curl -v http://sgillies.net/blog340
...
> GET /blog340 HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.15.4 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.4 ...
> Host: sgillies.net
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:29:47 GMT
< Server: Zope/(Zope 2.8.6-final, python 2.4.3, linux2) ZServer/1.1
< Content-Length: 0
< Location: http://sgillies.net/blog/340/blog-upgrade/
< Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
...

On the policy side: new, full-content feed of entries. I'm optimistic that this will increase the depth, if not the breadth, of my readership. Any any rate, I'm not selling ads on my blog pages, so there's nothing to lose.

This is how it's going to grow? From KML in sitemap files? I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I'm very interested in seeing the Web we have now geo-enable itself. I'd love to be able to search Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) for coverages and features, and never again visit barely usable geodata portals. On the other hand, this particular approach is just another damned catalog, and one based on a single application's proprietary language.

Count me in. As far as I'm concerned, the OLPC story is a thousand times more interesting than the iPhone. Imagine the potential wave of new, young neogeographers when these things hit the streets of Recife, Tripoli, Abuja, and maybe even Fort Collins.

Update: or not here in the Fort.

Last year I helped add support for geo-referenced Atom feeds in OpenLayers (example here), and today committed a GeoRSS module for the Python Cartographic Library: cartography.data.georss. Based on the Universal Feed Parser, it adapts simply geo-referenced entries of any RSS flavor to PCL's feature model. That done, the features flow right through the renderer.

Here's an example feed (used in the OpenLayers map above):

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta/atlas/browse/by-type/tumuli/georss

with its entries rendered into the very simple map below:

Cingular only? 2 year contract? Bah, humbug. I'm not turning over any more of my digital life to Apple.

Update: great rant by Mark Pilgrim about Apple's sharecropping.

I've got a pgscrubber 2 preview, pgscrubber-2.0a.user.js [MD5, SHA1] to go along with the new PlanetGS preview.

Mozilla XPath is brilliant. I'm now using the string function contains() to find posts to scrub, which simplifies the task of enumerating the blogs you want to screen out. These blogs are also now marked (in the sidebar) through with a line so you don't lose track of what's being scrubbed.

Downloads of the previous version were up quite a bit, indicating either that there are more and more Firefox users, or that there's more and more noise on PlanetGS.

I don't want to let James down, so here are five things you probably don't know about me:

My paternal grandfather's great-aunt, Ann Gillies, was the mother of Robert Parker, also known as Butch Cassidy. That makes him my second cousin. My family is still firmly rooted in Beaver, Utah.

My first computer was an Atari 800.

In my senior year at the University of Utah, I attended the infamous Pons-Fleischmann "Cold Fusion" press conference.

I launched Fort Collins's Summer Ultimate Frisbee League in 1995, and met my (now) wife at a league game in 2001.

We almost moved from the Fort to Riverside, California, at the end of 2005. Each of us had excellent job offers that were painful to turn down -- my wife from UCR, and I from UCR/UCLA -- but decided in the end that the congestion, pollution, and politics of the Inland Empire were unbearable.

Howard, Allan, Paul, Tom, you're it.

Update: Well, that was fun, but one meme is enough for me. I don't think I'll spread any others.