Now that the holidays are almost here… I wish you all a joyful and peaceful time. Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy time with your family, rest, relax, take some time off and recharge. All the best for the new year. See you in 2012!

I recently had a need for a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for location-based point data (a LatLong coordinate and some descriptive information) and then creates a KML-file from that data on the fly. A file like this can then easily be loaded into Google Maps, Google Earth and other geospatial applications. In [...]

Please upgrade your browser SketchUp QR from Alexander Schreyer on Vimeo. As you may have noticed, I have been experimenting with QR codes lately. There’s just so much fun you can have with these little black-and-white icons. For your Friday enjoyment, here is a list of where I have used them so far: 3D QR [...]

Now that the year is almost over, it’s time to step back and look at what we all built over the past weeks… Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year! Cheers, Alex P.S.: Yes, it’s [...]

I frequently get asked how to set up a small-ish CMS-driven (CMS = Content Management System) website for research groups or other entities. Many of these people have learned that maintaining a static website the “old-fashioned way” (e.g. using Dreamweaver) presents a variety of problems – mainly related to inconsistent content or collaborative editing problems. These issues [...]

While many functions in WordPress (the self-hosted kind) work like a charm, this one gave me the run-around a few days ago: The auto-saving post revisions that got added to WordPress a few releases back. On our departmental website (http://eco.umass.edu/) that I created in WordPress (works great for this purpose, it’s the “Just-enough CMS!”) we [...]

I had read about this trick before but had never had a need to try it out – until now. So here’s a nifty trick for any self-hosted WordPress installation: If you want to add a webpage outside of a WordPress installation that has its own design, yet relies on some of the functions of [...]

I was once again changing the design of one of my websites when I realized that it would be great if I could just move things around on a page to preview the changes – without any coding. As it turns out, there is a solution to that problem: A bookmarklet and a few lines [...]

Chirp, chirp… While I was figuring out how to make best use of all things Web 2.0, I found that Twitter is a great way for me to broadcast quick news items related to my blog’s topics (AEC-CAD, timber engineering, design and web stuff). So whenever something is too short for a blog post but [...]

As announced in their latest blog post, Google has just released an optimization feature for their online spreadsheets (which, of course, are part of Google Docs). With this new feature, linear optimization problems can be solved easily. This is a great feature and makes online spreadsheets even more Excel-like and usable. Here are some of [...]