Exploring Winnipeg Parks - Dev Blog for a Photography and Community Website

Welcome! For the past few years, I've been building up a website featuring my photos of parks, community centres, and other landmarks throughout my home town of Winnipeg. I started this personal project about a year-and-a-half into the Covid lockdown period, in large part as a way to get myself outdoors and staying active. Since then, I've visited enough parks throughout the city to post well over 100 photo galleries, with many more in the queue!

The website is called Exploring Winnipeg Parks. It offers an interactive map, a search function, an index page of all city parks and community centres, and plenty of photo galleries. It's free of advertisements, acting purely as a community service for Winnipeggers.

https://www.exploringwinnipegparks.ca/

Why a Blog?

I'm starting this blog as a way of documenting my journey from building a static HTML website, into a fully automated website using Python scripts. I'll also be sprinkling in posts about SEO (search engine optimization), how I'm using ChatGPT for technical discovery, and topics related to interactive maps and geo-spatial data. Over the past month or so, I've been introduced to a number of technologies and platforms, so I have plenty I want to talk about!

I originally started this blog over on Medium, but realized that my focus was primarily going to be on development topics. So here I am for the first time on a more dev-focused platform. This blog’s primary location is on GitHub Pages, where I'll maintain a repository with code samples whenever appropriate. I think this should be a better fit for what I plan to post about!

Hopefully, this little dev blog can be useful for any web developers out there looking to automate their website and deployment workflow, perform image processing, or deal with online interactive maps. Stay tuned for my dev discussions...