Cherry Blossoms It’s springtime in New York and cherry trees are starting to bloom. In fact street trees right outside my house in Staten Island are bright pink in flower right now… here’s a photo I took this morning. Google searches will reveal a few places you can go to see cherry trees with festivals dedicated to them and such. But there are lots of cherry trees along streets and in parks of NYC.
Edit 12 Feb 2018: Thanks to twitter I learned about being able to call GeoSearch via the rmapzen R package; see the end of this post for more info. Geocoding In GIS and various other fields, Geocoding is a common operation. Not familar with Geocoding? Check out this great definition from Google: Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like a street address) into geographic coordinates (like latitude and longitude), which you can use to place markers on a map, or position the map.
Why Blogdown? As I’ve noted before, my previous website was pretty basic. While it was largely simple to make updates, it wasn’t particularly elegant. It was functional, and definitely looked reasonable when it was first created. Editing it wasn’t too difficult, but took some forethought if I wanted to make updates across the website. I’m not at all trained in web development, and just I picked up a few things by working off a template a friend created for me, and toying around with some .
Time for a Change I got my original website started in the beginning of grad school (circa 2007), with great help from a college friend. As this one, it was static, but relied directly on CSS and HTML, with no real page generator in the sense of Jekyll or Hugo. It’s been great for me - serving as a place to link other projects I’ve developed; for example, a QGIS tutorial I wrote for a workshop, and materials from a GIS/Spatial Analysis course I taught as a postdoc.