articles

Update 5/1/15 - On a different instance of Mongo, I had run the command noted below and got errors. However, this worked:

mongoimport --db mean-dev -c points --file "points.geojson" --jsonArray

Let me save you the hours lost in trying to figure out getting GeoJSON features into individual documents in a collection versus one document with nested features.

MongoDB 3.0.2. Valid GeoJSON file full of 809 features.

Using this code:

mongoimport --db test --type json --file ./'mobilemaps.geojson' 

As we prepare to break ground on the next phase of construction at the house, I started to go back and record some of the projects we've done over the past few years. I've been sorting through thousands of images taken and trying to slim that down into some interesting reminders of how things used to look.

It kinda depends on where we start in the timeline, but it roughly went like this.

13 years ago, the side yard of the house looked like this. That's a bocce ball court with a xeryscape and brick patio.

Before I forget too much of 2014, I thought I'd write down some of the cool travel we did last year.

We started with a trip to Miami and Key West in late December through early January. We hung out at the Fontainbleu and the Southernmost House. Warm, good food, lots of exercise.

In late March through early April, we went to London for 10 days. Lnda's had a Courseara conference. I walked around the city listening to Elvis Costello, The Clash, Cream, Jeff Beck and others, seeing the sights and acting as support for Lynda and Lauren Butler

Here's how I lost 3 hours. In using a comination of these modules with the Drupal Foundation theme. I wanted a small search button aligned right in the right sidebar. See http://mobilemaps-dev-proxy.ucsc.edu.

• search api
• search api autocomplete
• search api live results
• Foundation 4 theme

function zurb_maps_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {

  // Sexy submit buttons

One thing that has been frustrating me in learning the MEAN stack has been how to extend the basic Article example (or a CRUD created module) beyond the basic data model. While you're trying to learn AngularJS and Mongoose/MongoDB interactions, you can find lots of literature on modelling, but little on how to modify your core CRUD views, model and controllers to work together. I'm sure that there may/are better and more elegant ways to accomplish this.

Importing to Mongo via jsonArray

mongoimport -d meanjs-leaflet4-dev -c leaflets -f name,coordinates --type json --file building-addresses.json --jsonArray

// sample file

// notes - coordinates needs to be bracketed to indicate an array otherwise we get string

// created - use a yyyy-mm-dd for basic entry

    [

    {

      "name": "Cowell College - Apartment  2",

Over the past week, in between meetings, I've gotten some additional functionality added. I've been able to enter a number of Leaflet nodes (records) and then display markers on the "list" view. I've created a link in the popup that then takes us to the detail record. I've also been taking Dan Whalin's Udemy course. His site has a 50% off coupon code.

I've been looking at how to refactor our campus maps app from being Drupal based to sometihng that is based on a RESTful API so that data can be easily shared with other apps. Drupal has gotten us a long way, but the map stack of modules we're using has some limitations. I need to pull some custom map work stored at Mapbox.com giving us deeper zooms and styling rules we've decided upon.

The MEAN stack offers one refactoring option. So, I spent Christmas vacation doing some reading, configuring and thinking about how the MEAN stack might work for our needs.

I'm still getting up to speed with SmartOS. Here are some notes I took while trying to get PostgreSQL on SmartOS to parse OpenStreetMap (osm) files. My intent is to use Mapbox Studio to do some custom styling for OSM as we develop some "single purpose" maps.

Here's the summary I wrote at LAX when I came home from MMWCON down at UCLA in September 2014.

I was ultimately successful in getting data parsed in the VM and can use Mapbox Studio to connect and style the maps. Now to find some time to finish that little project...

June 10, 2014 

Updated August 2015

Here are some rough notes on the process for getting a mapbox.com served set of tiles for the http://mobilemaps.ucsc.edu site (discontinued in June 2015).