My Experience Contributing to Open Source Projects

2019 is only two and a half months in, but I've already been more active in the open source community than I had anticipated.   During this short period of time, I've pushed code to the Esri Leaflet Doc, Esri Leaflet Vector, and Esri Leaflet Geocoder libraries.  I don't state this to boast in myself, but to …

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Why I’m Building a Blog Site With Jekyll

The subtitle for this article should be "A Novice's Journey of Building Multiple Websites."  And I understand the immediate irony of reading an article on WordPress about building a blogging site using Jekyll.  But over the course of this article, I'll share some experiences I've had building websites on a few different platforms.  And I'll …

Using ArcPy Search Cursors to Perform Spatial Analysis by Each Record in a Jurisdictional Dataset

Cumberland County is in the process of updating our Hazard Mitigation Plan.  Our GIS Department is focused on developing a web map series application, and performing various spatial analyses to support the plan. One of the first analyses we were asked to complete was to get a count of the number of structures in the …

How to Create a Featured Image Template for a Jekyll Blog Site

I wanted to share a solution I came up with for displaying a blog post's Featured Image on a Jekyll site.  There are two primary places I want to display this image: The page containing the blog post (post page) Within a loop of blog posts on any number of pages (i.e., home page, blog …

Announcing the Python for ArcGIS Course

Last summer was a busy and exciting season of life.  My wife and I welcomed our third child into the world, and I had the opportunity to develop the Python for ArcGIS course for Harrisburg Area Community College.  This self-paced online course is now available to purchase. The course consists of video lessons, exercises, and recommended …

Are You Thinking About Your Map Users?

Over the past few years, I've been working on a side project to update the hiking trails map for a small camp.  Though the project has taken longer than I anticipated, it has been very rewarding.  This past week, I think we finally finished the map.  And it was during this last revision process that …

Building the Find Zoning District By Parcel App

Our IT department is developing an online plan submission website for the County's Planning office.  In talking with the developers, the topic of finding the zoning district for a tax parcel (or piece of real estate) came up.  Our GIS department publishes services for both tax parcels and zoning districts.  I've also been wanting to …

The Most Important App Might Not Be The Most Fun

I have a confession to make: my organization's most viewed and most important web map app is not my favorite app to work on.  And it's taken me awhile to realize that this app is the one that needs to be the highest priority.  The Cumberland County Property Mapper receives around 98% percent of our …

GeoDev Summit Recap

I wanted to give a recap and tell the backstory to the recently held GeoDev Summit.  The event was held on March 5 at Harrisburg University of Science & Technology.  It was a one day conference for current and future GIS Developers.  Sessions covered topics like Esri's JavaScript API, open-source web GIS technologies, and desktop scripting …

Building A Soils Clip Tool for Agricultural Preservation Reporting

I'm getting close to wrapping up a project for our Planning department and wanted to share about it.  It's a custom ArcGIS Desktop geoprocessing tool that stemmed from a conversation with one of our planners.  He was having trouble clipping a dataset.  After figuring out the issue, I had him walk me through his entire …