Some days, everything is connected…

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has, for many years, been a support of the American Farmland Trust. The organization is one I’ve also had a personal interest in because of my work with the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust — we’re essentially in the same business, albeit at a vastly different scale.

Today I got an email from a staffer at the Farmland Trust in reaction to a post about an interactive foliage map I made last August; in the post I described how we’d taken the best of DIY MapServer maps and the Google Maps API to make a cool slippy map with some custom data layers.

At the Farmland Trust they have oodles of data about farmland loss in the USA. Data that, while useful, is locked up inside tiny JPEG images and PDF files. In other words, they’ve got data that would make a lot of sense to apply some MapServer/Google Maps mojo to. So my man at the Farmland Trust asked around. And someone sent him to my blog and the post.

Ironically, he knew neither that Yankee was the sister publication to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, nor of my involvement with the Land Trust. But in that funny way that sometimes connects exactly the right problems to the right solutions, we got connected.

Comments

James's picture
James on April 25, 2008 - 06:47 Permalink

With rising gas prices, there should be a virtual foliage gazing application based upon the previous years’ vista.

Similar to what you can do in San Francisco with this (minus the privacy issue in the mountains of New England):

http://www.mapjack.com/

Andrew MacPherson's picture
Andrew MacPherson on April 25, 2008 - 15:23 Permalink

I am currently listening to “The World is Flat” on audiobook. You are a perfect example of someone making the most of this…