Converting KML to Shapefiles

I did a number of posts on converting your GIS data to KML and sharing it with Google Earth, but I never looked at going in the opposite direction. Being in the GIS genre of geeks, I generally already have the data in a

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Google Maps Part…..Oh, I Forget - Google Earth

When I started this Google Maps bit, I predicted I would in short order veer off track from my stated outline and start muttering gibberish. I looked back at my posts in this series and I find that assessment to be gene

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Customizing Google Maps Part IV - Part Du

In the last Google Maps article we looked at customizing the API and adding our own data through a KML file. Now let’s take a look at doing something a bit more interesting, this time using our choice of web mapping API

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HTML vs. XHTML

Quite a while back I did a post on HTML document types. In that post I talked about how important it is to declare your document type to avoid quirks mode and random HTML rendering across browsers (i.e. spaghetti code).

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Free Enterprise Search Engine

At Mecklenburg County, our Information Services & Technology department has a Creativity and Innovation team. Being that I'm neither of those things, and also being that I'm not a part of Information Services &

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Customizing Google Maps - Part III - Customizing the Google Maps API

Now for the fun stuff. You can download the full tutorial HTML page and KML data here.Google Maps has a free API you can use to add Google Maps functionality directly to your site. You don’t get every single feature of

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Tame Your Unruly CSS Files

I find people generally fall in to two categories: people that have been writing HTML since pre-CSS days and believe CSS is a pox upon humanity, and people that started writing HTML post-CSS and find it to be the most w

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Customizing Google Maps - Part II - Converting Data to KML

KML isn’t a terribly difficult XML schema to create and edit by hand, but if you want to use some of your GIS data, there’s no need to go typing out coordinates until your carpel-tunnel flairs up. There are a couple of

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Customizing Google Maps - Part I - Adding Data to Google Maps

*Editor’s Note: I’ve updated this post a bit. In yet another show of how powerful I’ve become, after I made a comment about the Google Maps API not using KML, Google changed the API to incorporate both KML and GeoRSS f

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New Ways to Search for Code

The way we get a few bits of code for a project we’re working on has changed a lot over the past 5-10 years.In ancient times (circa 1995), code was handed down from one generation to the next. If you were a Programmer a

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