4 important moments in the history of Geofumadas

- We should have a blog ...

Said my boss (HM), with his gaze disconnected from this world. I felt sorry for not knowing the word that a 73-year-old man had mentioned before my stubborn complaint about why the Internet was disconnected to the municipalities that were doing cadastral maintenance. More than he said with his natural way of describing a scene 25 years ahead and why he always seemed to be enthroned with an astral version of reality.

My encounter with the word Blog.

That was my first encounter with the word blog in September of 2005 although it took several years to be chewed in the world of digital writers style blog.

Then I went to work in Guatemala and there I went back to the subject. By that time Blogger was a little less than depressing version, with a few templates in shrill tones. I had a hard time understanding its functionalities simply because they were few, with a couple of nights I was driven by the initial idea of ​​writing about CAD / CAM technologies in the unique exorcist style I knew.

But the stress of not having enough arguments and no idea how many people might be interested in reading, I stopped the subject after four tedious articles and started a blog obedient to the melancholy of leaving the country with the almost firm decision not to return in a long time. So I took my agenda and sketched 25 titles of possible short stories that could accompany my nostalgia on those lonely nights. I started writing in the kitchen with a German who could barely say Thank you when I served him a glass of smoothie that I prepared myself with fresh marañones from the trees of that house that the company had contracted for foreign engineers. Then he tried a conversation in English but that dry Scandinavian barely said Thanks and was gobbled up again on his laptop.

It was simple to write the stories, only had to do what the fifth grade composition teacher asked, with some literary touch of my writing class my first year of college. Everything flowed so fast that I wrote almost a story on a daily basis, in my opinion the best thing that I had produced, although years later I saw a professional editor working, I understood that the style is complicated, so much so that it can make us lose natural inspiration. Perhaps it was good not to know because my stories came as a runoff to the small circle of friends who enjoyed them and especially to the coterráneos of that boarding school where I spent a few years of my adolescence that ruminated them over, again and again with the later arrival of networks social.

When I reached 25 articles I published it in print and released it so I would not write more unless it was a special request. Sometimes I have recycled them around here.

My first encounter with WordPress

I was always afraid of WordPress, I had a hard time getting past the wp-config.php editing and then I didn't know where to walk. With the help of a Mexican friend I managed to install it and made my first pininos with a hybrid version between technological innovations and web blogging. I wrote times for myself, times for others in Serturista y Blogging... until Francisco noticed that he wrote more for me and almost threw me out.

It was an interesting stage of my life, there I lost my fear of the css style, to upset the .httaccess, simple tasks of php and other acronyms that arrived in a couple of months: header, sidebar, footer, metatag, cms, xmlrpc , css, atom ... a whole list is never over.

Eventually I talked about Google Earth, some web mapping applications, but it was very hard for me to write for an audience like the ones I had admired for years: Cartesia that existed from 2001 and GabrielOrtiz 2003 since.

One day in 2007 Tomás, the creator of Cartesia announced that he had built Cartesianos on WordPress MU, and everyone who wanted to have a blog about geomatics was welcome. By then I had already returned to my country on loan and was beginning a project that implied the conception of a multipurpose cadastre under the approach of joint municipalities.

Geofumadas.cartesianos.com

Choosing Geofumadas as a name was easy. One of my mentors (JJ) called me from time to time to sit in front of an oval table and while I was cleaning the Formica board with an eraser he said:

- Come on, let's smoke a coffee with space flavor.

After making some doodles on the blackboard, he sent me with the poem so that I could convert that diagram into a usable routine for the cadastral process. I ended up calling that inspiring moment “Geofumar” and when I started the installation of the site that was the name.

I must be honest that by then I did not think I would become what I am now. The beginnings were quite humble, several of us took Tomás' invitation but few of us the tenacity to write with obsessive discipline. So naive was my sense that at first the url was galvarezhn.cartesianos.com, like any other first site in which its author tries to highlight his name rather than a brand; although its heading was always Geofumadas. After a while it was necessary to pass it on to geofumadas.cartesianos.com.

Being quoted a couple of times in the forums of Cartesia motivated me although I challenged more the criticism of some who praised my good intention but questioned my occasional laxity, innocence of context and little exercised assertiveness. To them I must take more seriously the challenge of writing for a globalized world without forgetting that I have a UTM coordinate, a family, some friends, a girl and a blog.

Time made the statistics grow, WordPress became friendlier, with plugins and themes that Tomás goodwill was impossible to keep track of with Cartesians. I bought the domain geofumadas.com but I refused to leave Cartesianos, more out of gratitude to Cartesia than for the 45 quality visitors that the home page brought me. However, the opportunity arose when WordPress MU announced to stop its development so as not to duplicate the effort of WP Multi sites, so I asked Tomás if Cartesianos would go there.

- If only you and tux are still writing-. He told me.

So I understood that as permission to go to Geofumadas.com.

Tomás and Geofumadas.com

It took 6 years for me to meet Tomás in person. We had spoken long paragraphs although it was always about topics encrypted after OGC standards. But after three trips to Europe, all the fruit of the blog, I decided to stop by Spain to chew on the tablecloth and visit some fans.

It was funny that being the one who talks a lot about maps, I got lost because I wanted to know how the subway and my iPad worked. The founder of Cartesia.org sat at his crisp glass desk, wearing a tan coat and well-polished slippers that made him look like anything but a surveyor. When he got up I could see that he was taller than I imagined, his tone of voice did not go with the aggressive moderator of the forums in his firm positions in front of the COITT Although his spirit of good people hunted exactly with the image of of Peter Parker in the episode of the Green Goblin.

A girl accompanied me there, I am not saying she guided me because she was half to blame that I lost my way; Today I am sad to tell it because we forget that I was texting at the end of the table until hunger cracked after almost two hours of talking about Pleiades images, orthorectification and the scope of ZatocaConnect. We apologized to her for the first time and we went to the corner for something to eat, we saw her again until we waited for the Custard For dessert and this time it was Tomás who apologized.

-Sincerely, how sorry. He said, with more charisma.  But we have never talked with this man.

-How not, it shows. She said drawing her roots in a Caribbean honesty grin.

And then we went back to immerse ourselves in the chat, we talked about my children whose images have grown in linked articles on the blog, also theirs until out of respect for work we returned to the Infoterra office. To say goodbye, I gave a compliment in the format of the third apology to the girl who began to sweat anger in pixels.

-You must know that half of my achievements are due to Thomas.

And he took it away with the fencer's skill.

-And when he was famous and great, he left Cartesian.

The laughter was worth the moment, we hugged each other and then I went to compensate for my grief touring Toledo with the girl who no longer wanted to be a guide after a couple of Brazilian friends joined us.

Conclusion

I must end this article because the 43,000 feet have been finished and we have been asked to turn off the electronic devices, so I will finish as short as possible.

More than moments, they have been people: HM, JJ, Tomás, they have been significant people in this episode that I have only summarized here in short steps. But the route is longer and there are more significant people than I have met through this blog. Some of them collaborate with me, others barely read the headlines, others eventually return to see if a spike that seems familiar to them falls off and others maintain permanent contact via Skype, mail or social networks.

Getting to have 110,000 monthly visits took a lot of effort, almost all by trial and error. In time the international version arrived (EGeomate.com) with which NG became my psychologist and the social networks that released the pressure for important headlines. I believe in the democratization of knowledge that others started before me; Now I am grateful for the cordiality with which GabrielOrtiz and Cartesia received me, this and more motivated me to ride Z! Spaces to instead of competing for advertisers, work collaboratively.

I've seen many ideas come and go, some too good to die for. WordPress and gvSIG have shown me that the Open source model is as promising as proprietary software and that we will have to fight for it, with it and sometimes against it. Every time a new blog arrives with the name of its head author, my hope is reborn that in 6 years another can feel this happy. Because the more of us who live together in this ecosystem, the more sustainable the Hispanic context than geofuma gml but lives the charisma of melancholy, which is inspired by the successes of others and tolerates non-contextual sarcasm.

So cheer up. If one day you started a blog, forum or page, please do so. If you have plans to open a new one, go ahead there is room for everyone.