Support Barack Obama with a Website Bumper Sticker!

You may have noticed on this website that I am now sporting my political colors and am now officially endorsing Barack Obama for re-election as President of the United States. I support his policies and encourage every reader of this blog in the US to vote for him in the upcoming election. As you can […] Read more..

Limit BuddyPress registration by domain

I am currently running a few WordPress installations with the great BuddyPress plugin. If you don’t know this plugin yet: you can create your own social network using this plugin. For example, it is possible to add groups, forums, membership, and even “@” commenting and discussions (like Twitter). Pretty nifty, really. One thing that stumped me […] Read more..

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..