Yesterday I received the mail from Anita Graser’s blog about the best 10 articles on QGIS planet. Therefore I decided to have a look on our own top ten list of most read articles this year. And I have to admit: It’s not the open source world who leads this list…The whole list only shows English articles disregarding our job page which is the most read page on this blog (sidenote: you can post your job offer for free 😉 )

#10 – #5

I was surprised to see an install-something article on this list but with the release of QGIS 2.0 QGIS probably hit the road big time and there were many people who would like to try it out on their Ubuntu (#10). Two out of five articles covered the topics of D3. A great technology for webmapping and data visualisation created by Mike Bostock. Unfortunately Ralf seems to be very busy with other stuff and there were no newer tutorials on D3 on our page recently but maybe you will find some news on his blog (If you know D3 and want to write about, give us a “quick call”).

The other two articles covered some ArcGIS content. One of it was a widely discussed one about the performance of ArcGIS Server were I just translated an old article from 2012 which itself cited a paper. It was going crazy with this one. But the other one was a quite normal one on how to make a topographic map by our Russian author Andrew Klikunov. Unfortunately this was a one-hit wonder…

3D visualisations with NVIZ and a description on how to create a leaflet based webmap with your data in QGIS had also an impact on our number of visitors.

#4

Let’s enter the upper part of the list. Number four is QGIS specific and described the process of joining data with vector data/features. This a somewhat day-to-day problem as spatial data is often just a hull for meaningful data and the attributes needs to be added and enhanced to create the map for the spatial objects you would like to show. In QGIS it’s quite easy but yet I think it’s not the everyday business especially for non GIS-ers like journalists or teachers.

#3

Once again: D3… This was our first article on D3 and it simply described the first steps in using D3 as a JavaScript framework. It had nothing to do with webmapping. But D3 means “Data Driven Documents” and so does this tutorial: show stuff you can do with any element:

#2

The rating for this one so far is only 3 out of five stars but it seems to gain some attraction to our readers: How to georeference a map in QGIS. It is also an everyday task for persons working with GIS and it is not always as easy as in this case. Searching for ground control points, determining the correct projection of the image and using the best resampling technique isn’t the most easy task in QGIS. This article show you the steps from determining the projection of the scanned map, selecting the correct CRS in QGIS and using coordinate crosses from the map for a quick and dirty georeferenciation.

#1

Once again: Georeferenciation. But in this case we are using ArcGIS 10. Same steps like in QGIS: scanned image, coordinate crosses from the map choosing good resampling of pixel values and exporting the whole thing as a georeferenced image for ongoing analysis or publishing.

The Numbers

You’re more interested in numbers then in lists? Check it out here with the numbers of pageviews in the year 2014: