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Tuesday 20 May 2008

Welcome to How 2 Map

This is a continuation of my blog over at java.net. While Java.net is a great way to contact the Java crowd the set up is a little too formal, clunky and language specific for a lot of what I talk about. The recent deluge of spam comments has finally pushed me to move on.

I have kept a blog very in-frequently; but I have been doing a lot of writing. To start off this blog I wanted to cover the kind of writing I am willing to do on the web; and see if I could work that into a useful article / publication / web-log thing that would be interesting enough for others to follow.
  • Email: I write a lot of email, sometimes very detailed and researched, sometimes quick (and in my limited opinion funny).
    Email can occasionally be turned into a good blog post, but usually they make a good topic for an article (since you need to fill is so much context
  • Documentation: I have taken to writing documentation, and sending email links, rather than directly taking part in the geotools user list or udig user list.
    Problem is it seems only I know what has been written, in fact the best way for me to tell if the documentation is successful is to watch what kind of questions are asked on the user list. Last year at this time all the questions were about connecting to WFS or opening a Shapefile, this year there are lots of questions about drawing maps. Looks like the documentation on working with data is starting to work...
What I am not going to do is write big long articles; while these can be very valuable - the time is better spent on coding or documentation.

2 comments:

Mateusz Loskot said...

Jody,
I've taken the liberty and updated your feed on the Planet OSGeo. So, now your new blog is syndicated.

I hope you don't mind :-)

Jody Garnett said...

Thanks muchly, I will still use the old blog (but mostly for java specific ranting), this one is obviously a bit more suitable for Planet OSGeo