Introducing Planet Geospatial

October 21st, 2005 · 18 Comments · GIS

I’ve had this idea in my head ever since I’ve started posting every GIS blog I’ve found on my blog front page figure out a way to bring them all together so people can follow the GIS blog community without having to visit every site I was thinking this would be a good way to introduce people to new GIS blogs also, rather than just visiting the top 5. Anyway after learning way too much about Python and FreeBSD I’ve finally gotten the script to work.

Anyway, announcing Planet Geospatial.

What is it?

Planet Geospatial aggregates posts from just about every GIS blog I can find that posts regualarly or is important for strategic reasons and serves them in a variety of formats from headlines to full posts and RSS (you can subscribe to Planet Geospatial on its own). The script is set to rebuild the files every hour so posts may not show up instantly. There is a timestamp on the front page that shows last rebuild.

There are still some issues as posts modified will show up again on Planet Geospatial and some feeds created by many of the bloggers don’t validate (I’ve had to escape out of most of them) so many of you might want to validate your RSS feeds.

I’ve probably missed some feeds so please email me with any suggestions or comments about Planet Geospatial.

Update - I didn’t think to offer this, but if you wish to be removed from Planet Spatial, just email me too. I’ll get it out of there ASAP with no questions asked.

Tags:

18 responses so far ↓

1 Mateusz Łoskot // Oct 22, 2005 at 4:29 am

The Planet idea is great!
Now I can visit one place and get all spatial blogs I love.
Thanks James!
2 Sean Gillies // Oct 22, 2005 at 9:01 am

Russ Nelson has been doing this since the end of 2004 at http://planetgis.russnelson.com/ but I’ve fallen away from it because he’s mistaken gisuser.com press releases for the kind of news people want to read.
3 James Fee // Oct 22, 2005 at 10:42 am

Good thing I didn’t name it Planet GIS then huh?
4 James Fee // Oct 22, 2005 at 10:38 pm

Actually the weirdest thing I’ve seen over the past couple days is the amount of HTML code people put into titles of blog entries. I think Blogger is particularly bad about this with their Atom feeds, but interesting enough TypePad has trouble too.
5 ubikcan // Oct 23, 2005 at 9:23 am

Very good idea. Don’t forget Urban Cartography!

Also, Bloglines just can’t seem to subscribe to it properly (doesn’t update, has lots of html in the summary).
6 Brian Flood // Oct 23, 2005 at 9:26 am

nice work James, appreciate you putting this together
brian
7 James Fee // Oct 23, 2005 at 9:27 am

Yea, I’ve been playing with it trying to decided how to format the feed. I stripped out pretty much everything, but then the links and pictures wouldn’t show. Maybe I can offer more types of feeds and that might help. Let me see what I can do.
8 James Fee // Oct 23, 2005 at 9:50 am

OK, I’ve gotten the RSS 1.0 feed to work in Bloglines. The RSS 2.0 feed doesn’t work as well so just use the following link. I’ve update the planet website to direct to the RSS 1.0 feed also.

http://planet.spatiallyadjusted.com/rss10.xml
9 ubikcan // Oct 23, 2005 at 10:21 am

Quick work! That RSS1 feed works great in bloglines (funny, they say they can handle 2.0). Thanks.
10 Laurent Jégou // Oct 23, 2005 at 11:42 am

Really a good idea, i was doing the same “manually” with Sage extention on firefox, but i’ve missed a bunch of sources, thanks
11 James Fee // Oct 23, 2005 at 12:49 pm

“funny, they say they can handle 2.0“

I’m sure it is my custom RSS feed. I didn’t like the default one so I created my own. I seem to have done a better job with the RSS 1.0 feed. Guess I should read up more on the RSS 2.0 spec.
12 Jason Harris // Oct 24, 2005 at 7:49 pm

Good job. I had been mulling this one over for a while. Thanks for beating me to the punch…I don’t have the time anyway. Heheh.

PS - I fixed my rss feed. Should be able to pick it up now.
13 James Fee // Oct 24, 2005 at 9:59 pm

I added it back in Jason.

I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about Cold Fusion
14 James Fee // Oct 24, 2005 at 10:43 pm

OK, the RSS 2.0 feed is working again. I can’t figure out why, but Glenn’s Blog is the culprit. In a weird twist, his feeds validate, but when I add him to Planet Geospatial, it causes a major error because of the dash in the title of his blog. I can only assume that it really isn’t a standard “-”, but some ASCII coded “_”. I tried to escape out of the titles, but that took away some functionality of the site. I’ll work on Glenn’s feed some over the next day to get it back in. So if you prefer RSS 2.0, you can now us it (it doesn’t validate, but it is close enough that most readers dont’ care). The RSS 1.0 feed also has the same problem, but again it is close enough. Most of the time it is the Atom feeds of blogger, but blogger doesn’t give you any control over them so I have to figure out a way to handle it on my side. Glenn’s blog is hosted on blogger, but he has a feedreader feed that still has the same problem.

I’ll figure it out… Hopefully this will go on cruse control by next week so I won’t have to even look at Python again.

Oh wait, I deal with Python every day with ArcGIS. Someone care to add Avenue to ArcGIS scripting choices?
15 James Fee // Oct 24, 2005 at 10:43 pm

OK, the RSS 2.0 feed is working again. I can’t figure out why, but Glenn’s Blog is the culprit. In a weird twist, his feeds validate, but when I add him to Planet Geospatial, it causes a major error because of the dash in the title of his blog. I can only assume that it really isn’t a standard “-”, but some ASCII coded “_”. I tried to escape out of the titles, but that took away some functionality of the site. I’ll work on Glenn’s feed some over the next day to get it back in. So if you prefer RSS 2.0, you can now us it (it doesn’t validate, but it is close enough that most readers dont’ care). The RSS 1.0 feed also has the same problem, but again it is close enough. Most of the time it is the Atom feeds of blogger, but blogger doesn’t give you any control over them so I have to figure out a way to handle it on my side. Glenn’s blog is hosted on blogger, but he has a feedreader feed that still has the same problem.

I’ll figure it out… Hopefully this will go on cruse control by next week so I won’t have to even look at Python again.

Oh wait, I deal with Python every day with ArcGIS. Someone care to add Avenue to ArcGIS scripting choices?
16 J // Oct 25, 2005 at 2:01 am

James, this is awesome! A really nice site to bring the GIS world even closer
17 Peter Minton // Jan 16, 2006 at 2:34 pm

I have a couple of GIS blog sites that might be of interest. Their addresses are:

EVS-Journal
http://evs-journal.blogspot.com/
(contains general EVS mapping related information)

EVS-Islands
http://evs-islands.blogspot.com/
(contains specific EVS island maps and Landsat images)

My site contains original maps created using Landsat 2000 imagery. I use Global Mapper software to digitize from the Landsat imagery. I do additional work on my maps in MARPLOT (free government mapping software). Finally, my finished map is recreated in Global Mapper, which supports a wide variety of map file formats (for exporting purposes).

I primarily map islands (I’m currently working on maps of the Tuamotu Archipelago). The completed map along with the image I used to digitize it from are then posted on EVS-Islands and a notification of posting is placed on EVS-Journal.

The EVS stands for Enhanced Vector Shorelines. My base map is the WVS (World Vector Shorelines) map file. The WVS scale is 1:250000. This scale is far superior to DCW 1:1000000. But is extremely course compared to maps that can be created using Landsat 2000 imagery. Many of my EVS maps have a scale ranging from 1:62500 to 1:31750.

It is my intent to offer my map files or a JPEG copy at no charge. You request the map file by name via email and I will email you the file, files or JPEG.

I am not a GIS professional. I am a map-making hobbyist. I love the process of creating a cartographically sound product. I believe there are some people out in the GIS-World that will find my maps of interest.

Thank you for taking the time to look my information over. Please, feel free to visit my sites. Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.

Peter Minton
San Diego CA
18 glenn // Jan 16, 2006 at 11:06 pm

James, this goes back a bit regarding the issues that my blog caused on planet geospatial. Obviously you figured things out (see comment above from Oct 24) but seems that whenever I tried implementing funky things like adding a script from my flickr photos it would totally freak out the blogger weblog. Obviously Google apps and Yahoo! blog apps don’t like each other too much. Thanks again for planetgeo… I’ve tried integrating a nokia lifeblog mobile app with flickr and managed to really freak out flickr for a bit (and blogger too) so that was a bit of fun ;0)