Welcome to the New Mapchats Blog
Regular readers may have checked out the blog today and noticed something’s a little different. It’s a tad more purple, for one thing. And it has a new name. Oh, and it’s possible you noticed the totally redesigned layout.
As part of our recent site redesign (more on that soon), we’ve made some changes to the blog. Or, I should say, blogs, since there are two of them now.
New Name
For the past year, we’ve used Mapchats as the name of our webinar series, highlighting how people in different policy disciplines work with data and GIS. We’re now using this name, Mapchats, for our blog, since it has the same role of talking in depth about data and mapping. Never fear: Mapchats Webinars aren’t going anywhere, they’re just sharing their name.
In addition to the Mapchats Blog, we also now have the News Blog. This is where we’ll write about some of the goings-on at PolicyMap, like conferences we’re visiting, changes to our product, new and notable subscriber projects, and the increasingly common honors and awards (this blog will not be a place for modesty). Posts will occasionally appear in both blogs, such as news about new functionality which affect how our users access our data. Rest assured, if there’s ever humongous news like “POLICYMAP WALKS ON MOON”, we’ll post it to both blogs.
New Layout
Tiles have come to our blog. The previous version of the blog had the old traditional one-column format where you’d scroll down, see the first chunk of every blog post, and could click “See more” if you wanted to read the whole post. The new one is quite different. The blog home page shows a bunch of tiles with a title and short description of the post, with additional pages for older posts. You can see the whole array of recent posts, and click on the one that interests you most. It’s like the front page of a newspaper.
New Logo
Okay, maybe that’s still a work in progress…
Hey, We’re Also on Twitter!
Sometimes we have interesting things to say that aren’t quite long enough for a blog post. Follow us on Twitter to stay abreast of the latest news and updates to PolicyMap and its data.