Archive for May, 2008

Jeffery Friedl’s Blogging Workflow

Friday, May 30th, 2008

I just ran into this wonderful blog, and am reading the author’s description of the , process he uses to create his blog. I have to admit, the blog is amazing, the images stunning, and the writing crisp. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine doing anything like his process, because by the time I am done, I will be celebrating new decade.

So here is how he does it: the blog is conceived from a daily activity recorded in images. He first selects quality images which tell a story, or individual images of such beauty that stands on its own. He edits the pictures and arranges them to tell the story, and uses scripts to move them to the server. Then the writing step starts – the prose is written and the images arranged in the right order to match the text. Image captions are added, followed by proof reading, corrections and spell checking, several times if necessary. The final step is the sipping of a cold beer, but not before a lot more drudgery that you will have to read in the original post.

I think the result is amazing, but I still prefer my own method – skip the images, write the text, proof, spell check, and publish. Not as elegant, but no no one reads these posts anyway, and those who do have not complained so far, so it must be good enough…

Cheers!

GPSMan just got better

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

My last two posts described tricks I use to manipulate GPSMan data files. I communicated these techniques to the nice people who gave us GPSMan, and found out there are way to edit waypoints and tracks, as well as routes and groups, which enable grouping of points and tracks, chopping away parts of tracks, combining different tracks into larger entities, and many more useful tricks.

I think that rather than go into all of that here and now, I will write a series of mini-tutorial or mini-howto blogs, each describing some of GPSMan’s functionality and application.

About the one thing that GPSMan can’t do for me yet is exporting to KML format, which Google Earth uses. But the program’s author promised to look into that. If they do that, it will be a huge time saver for me.