Welcome to my new blog on firststrike.net! My main areas of interest and expertise as a web developer involve both wikis and mapping/GIS, as well as implementing other open source solutions including Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. There is so much going on with development of new, improved mapping and wiki tools, as well as interesting applications, and with mapping, there also is the issue of data.
In recent years, with the arrival of Google Maps and Google Earth, the popularity of mapping for a mainstream audience has exploded. Starting out ten years ago in the field of mapping/GIS, the tools available mainly were proprietary and buying desktop GIS software cost thousands of dollars. Nowadays, mapping is increasingly deployed via the web, which makes it much more widely available to the public. And there are open-source GIS tools that are very powerful and capable, including GeoServer for web mapping, PostGIS (with PostgreSQL) to provide GIS data and analysis capabilities, GDAL/OGR to translate data between formats, and Quantum GIS and uDig as desktop packages. And, of course, Google Maps is customizable in countless ways, though it’s not open source in the same sense.
For several years now, I have also become involved with wikis, namely using/implementing the MediaWiki software and helping out over on Wikipedia. I have managed to get a number of articles on Wikipedia to “featured status”, which qualifies them to spend a day on the main page of Wikipedia. Behind the scenes, I have learned numerous tricks for customizing the MediaWiki software to make my editing and administrative duties more efficient, and modify the interface. And for people with programming skills (including myself), there is the MediaWiki API, the ability to write bot programs to do automated editing tasks, and the possibility of creating extensions to the MediaWiki software.
With all that’s going on with mapping, wikis, and other open source tools, there is much to talk about and highlight here on a blog. So, the blog is launched!