neaRThings A spatial doodle

Write Again

19 Jul 2022

Writer’s Block

So COVID-19 happened and about two years of my blogging streak got swallowed in the global pandemic ‘time blackhole’. The urge to write always lingered though. Google Analytics has been constantly spurring me on with it’s monthly reports of visitors to my site. 59 unique visitors in one month, without active promotion of the site is pretty encoraging. The post of 2018 on Relate and Joins being the most popular. This taught me the apparent lesson that well titled posts generate more hits. I am a ‘spur of the moment’ poet, so a play with words is an ever present temptation. I have however had DMs requesting further information directly from my other posts. The formal work front has been busy and the aggressive fun tinkering side…not so much. The software on my PC and my github repo attest to this ‘writers block’ but, Google Analytics and DMs have drawn me out.

Outdated Apps

I haven’t been entirely idle though. Having taken some students through fundamental GIS concepts. If it counts for something, I made this globe to pimp my work from home workbench. A labourious but rewarding weekend project.

During

Globe Pieces

After

Hung Globe

Writer’s Back

I am excited to lift out some posts from the drafts folder to published; research on and write about two spatial data wrangling problems I ran into. To keep even busier, have enrolled a mentorship program on setting up and running a geoportal this August. This will be to keep myself busy and sort of relearn some tools I have used before.

#Postscript

The way my blog is set up is a bit of a tangle. I write on my laptop (SubimeText) and publish to GitHub. There are leaner tools to blog with but satisfaction of ‘seeing’ coloured text and git in action tickles the tinkeror in me. “Commit to master”