Looking for a Park in the City of Poway?

There are quite a few parks within the City of Poway.
Here’s a map of them to aid you in locating where to go for a walk, or party, or dog walk, or whatever.

Want to make a map with your topic of interest on it, and use it in your web site? It’s easy!
Esri continues to update and expand ArcGIS.com with new features and functionality. Lots of great stuff there now, and more continues to be released every few months – you can do things like the embedded maps you see on this blog, and all for free!

A nice feature is drag & drop of CSV files to create “dots on a map” – this is how I got the Poway Parks on the map below. This functionality was recently upgraded to allow for your CSV file to be stored online in the location of your choosing – and when updates happen to that online file, they are reflected on your map without you having to reload & re-symbolize the data! Very nice.

When you are creating your map with the ArcGIS.com map viewer your searches will now be more relevant – it used to be that a search for “fire” brought back a LOT of layers to dig through, many from other states, or around the world. Interesting, but generally not very useful when building a map view focused on a single city. Well, the December 2011 ArcGIS Online update added Spatial Search. So now when I am zoomed into Poway and I search on “fire” – I get a much more relevant list of map services returned to me.
Also be sure to check out the bottom of that post because it has some information on ArcGIS Online subscriptions. More on this in the next few months,

Also remember that the maps you create and share with ArcGIS.com can be used in multiple ways. Below is an example of how easy it is to embed a map. But I could have also chosen to use this map as a web application. Check it out: http://bit.ly/vF0c2I 
A new feature in a recent update was the ability to share a map, select one of the ArcGIS.com map app templates, and then actually publish that map into the ArcGIS Online cloud! This is fantastic for community groups or agencies that don’t have a public facing ArcGIS Server box, but want to be able to share information publically. More and more important these days for public agencies looking to increase transparency into their data and work. Feel free to ping me if you want to do this but aren’t sure where to go.

I highly recommend keeping an eye on the ArcGIS Online Blog – it is updated often with tips & tricks as well as announcement and descriptions on updates as they occur. There’s a lot to keep up with Enhanced HTML5 support, KML support, enhanced sharing, more symbols & symbol search, support for secure ArcGIS services (this is huge for many agencies),

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Have fun in Poway! Be sure to also visit the city web site.

Also – let me know about maps you are creating and embedding, or that you publish with an ArcGIS.com template. I’ll highlight it here on my blog!

Happy mapping!