North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

QGIS

New Training Classes on QGIS

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I know – possibly my most failed blog topic as I talk about this a lot and never get anything done.

Well – I finally got something done. Well almost done. The first part of January found me in Denver Colorado teaching a 3 day QGIS class for SolSpec  covering the ins and outs of QGIS. I have a 1 day intro class that has made the rounds for about 5 years. It’s well tested and works and hasn’t been adjusted much except for changes to the software.

I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.

Now that I’m back and have a chance to reviews notes on what went well and what didn’t – I’m announcing two more classes to round out the QGIS trilogy: QGIS II and QGIS III. I want to call the whole thing: QGIS, A New Hope, QGIS Strikes Back, and Revenge of QGIS. I won’t as I don’t want sued out of existence.

Anyway – the next two days cover:

  • Project settings
  • Raster and vector tools
  • Processing
  • Processing modeler
  • Analysis tools
  • Maybe some python – I’m undecided on this one for day 3.

I end this all by pointing at PostGIS and yelling a lot. Well – not really yelling but pointing wildly.

Keenesburg Colorado

Why didn’t I do this years ago? I actually work more on client projects more than I teach but there’s been a pretty big upswing in people asking for training on QGIS. So I’m currently reworking parts and portions and getting ready to push this two more days out the door. As far as Pricing I’m working on a 3 day package deal for people and pricing for organizations.

Introduction to QGIS Class in Chattanooga – 1st Quarter 2019

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…or somewhere close.  The QGIS class may be just outside of Downtown or in some trendy part where we can eat lunch. At some point……yeah I know nothing like specifics.

Due to popular demand – I’m actually going to attempt a QGIS Class locally. There are some people I’ve emailed BUT in the hope of more people I’m including a form for you to put some information so we can figure out when it’s a good time to hold the class. Everyone has different schedules and maybe this doesn’t happen, or it does happen, or it happens twice. Yeah – I know. This should happen early in 2019 and I’ll give everyone enough time to plan – but I need to know interest before I start putting this together.

Anyway – this will be the 1 day QGIS Workshop and this will be a “certified” class as we will throw money back towards the QGIS community. Price will be $325 for 1 day. Food not included. Fun included. Bring some questions, a laptop, and other things and we’ll learn something. I’m hoping for between 7 to 10 people.

FOSS4GNA 2019 Call for Papers now open

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The call for papers is open on FOSS4GNA 2019. The conference will be April 16-18 2019 at the Marina Village Conference Center in San Diego California.

Am I going to submit? I think so. I did some work with a 911 locally in TN and I think it’s worth talking about just because of the hoops we had to jump through to make everyone happy on the ESRI side of the house.So more than likely I will fall under policy and planning.

So – check it out. The official website is http://2019.foss4g-na.org/. If you’ve never been to a FOSS4G meeting you should give it a go. You get a massive amount of technical with people that want to talk to you. You meet developers and discuss the ups and downs of life and software.

I’ll see you there.


QGIS 3.4 is out

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…..And you’re saying “WE ALREADY KNOW THAT”…….. Well – maybe you didn’t.

If you’ve been keeping up with all the excitement you’ll know that QGIS releases often. Every release features new functionality. The release schedule got to be a bit much for some – so a LTR (Long Term Release) was produced that is stable for one year. As of right now the stable release is the 2.18 series.

QGIS publishes their release schedule and it more or less stays on target within a day or two. If you’ve been using 2.18 religiously there’s a good chance you’ve been using it for well over a year (maybe 2?). 2.18 is stable. 3.4 is going to be the next LTR in February 2019. You may want to start testing 3.4 to see how it fits in your workflow and projects. Why?

If you haven’t used the 3 series yet it’s different. New python version, new processing toolbox, new everything. Different – but not enough to make you scream – but possibly enough you may want to play with your workflows a bit.

How different? 

3D What?

Plus you may have some plugins missing that haven’t been ported over from 2.18. So you may want to start bugging your favorite plugin author and think about possibly sponsoring the migration (if it hasn’t happened).

Most of my clients have stayed on 2.18 so I’ll be pushing them over the next bit to migrate.

So Download the new version and have some fun with it!

Editing your data in QGIS

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It has been a while. I’ve had a running project in PostGIS now that is 4 years old. It ends this month. It spent 3 years as a shapefile and one year as a File Based Geodatabase before I decided to “learn hos this postgis thing works”.  Having a running project last for that long is a bit rare on my end. With that ending other things are starting up which is nice – because I tend to seek out a comfortable routine and don’t push myself.

Flash forward to this month’s fun.  Sixty one columns and 22,000 something points. Not that insane – but editing is a bit of a chore. AS you’ve got 61 columns of stuff. Do they edit all 61 columns? No.

I did the new standard routine of loading QGIS/PostGIS/Geoserver/Fulcrum and we were off and running. As it turns out it had been a while since they had edited and the backlog was filling up.

Part of the fun of a new client is learning their processes. One the first things we did is start editing data. This can be a bit unnerving for new users:

You get all 61 columns in one menu upon adding new data. The cool thing with QGIS is there’s a good way to reduce the choices using the tools you’re provided. If you right click the layer in the Layers Panel and go to Properties and then to Attributes form you’ll notice at the very top you’ve got three choices. The first being just use the default. The second would be the drag and drop designer. You can remove the things you don’t need to edit. So just start clicking that minus button on the form layout.  Yes I just randomly removed a bunch of stuff as an example.

You can now edit things with a little bit less confusion.

So now when you add a point:

BUT…..What if you want a less confusing menu for editing? YOU SAID THREE CHOICES FOR MENUS AND YOU ONLY MENTIONED TWO. Part 2 is coming…..WHY DIDN’T I INCLUDE IT NOW? Well….my posts are too long as is…..

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