Google

Who’s got the best aerial photos: Google, Bing or Esri?

On the day of the 9/11 anniversary, I was looking at Google Maps (as you can see – on the iPad). Because I also have the Esri app installed, I went to check out their (and Bing‘s) imagery as well, which led to an interesting discovery that neatly illustrates quality differences between all of these prime mapping […] Read more..

“Favorite Places” presented at NEARC Spring Conference 2012

Together with a colleague of mine (Sasha Stepanov from Campus Planning), I just presented the “My Favorite Places” website (and the UMass “Likes/Dislikes” site) at the 2012 Spring Conference of NEARC, an ArcGIS user group here in the Northeast. All in all, this was a great event (held at beautiful Smith College) that allowed me […] Read more..

Using robots.txt to your advantage to reduce server load

A little while ago, my hoster (1and1.com) whom I actually like quite a bit, decided that I was using too much of my fair share of the common server and decided to warn me that I was “abusing” the system. They told me that if I didn’t reduce my server load, I would have to […] Read more..

What’s Your Favorite Place at UMass?

I finally got around to writing something about an exciting project that I completed last year at UMass (and which I presented at the Google Geo User Summit 2011 in the meantime). This is the crowdsourcing website application where students, faculty, alumni, employees and visitors to UMass can submit their favorite places on our campus. […] Read more..

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012!

Now that the holidays are almost here… I wish you all a joyful and peaceful time. Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy time with your family, rest, relax, take some time off and recharge. All the best for the new year. See you in 2012!

Placemarks from KML

Creating a KML file from MySQL data with PHP

I recently had a need for a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for location-based point data (a LatLong coordinate and some descriptive information) and then creates a KML-file from that data on the fly. A file like this can then easily be loaded into Google Maps, Google Earth and other geospatial applications. In […] Read more..