In an effort to run a simple python script in the CGA classroom, I opted to create an example python script that showcases a basic class structure that can be easily manipulated. The hope was to use this as a launching point towards writing a python-based toolbox for the first part of this class.

Of course, Python 3 does not run from the command line on the classroom’s machines, even though a version of Python 3 is installed.

A first ditch effort was to add to the user’s environment variables the path to the Python 3 executable, which completely and utterly failed. Caveat, a student adeptly pointed out that by changing the executable’s name from Python.exe to Python3.exe, you can totally call it from the command line. Rather, I went through the arduous process of hacking into ArcGIS Pro’s python environment, which is a three-step process:

  1. Clone the original Python 3 environment used by ArcGIS Pro
  2. Append the path to the ArcGIS/Pro/bin/Python/Scripts folder to the user environments
  3. Activate the cloned python environment from the command line

This seems completely ridiculous at first glance; however, in my opinion, programming works best when the testing environment is separate from the working environment.

Jekyll Updates

I attempted to leave Jekyll behind for an alternative blogging site (R blogdown), but after a few hours, it became obvious that this was even more complicated than Jekyll.

So, I have finally decided to read through some of the Jekyll documentation and in doing so, I have created my blog site. This required creating a _posts directory that contains very specifically named markdown files and creating a blog.md (with a proper YAML header) that uses Liquid tags to read each markdown file in my _posts directory and prints them in reverse chronological order.

Finally.

The other success story was removing the overflow=hidden property from my navigation menu; now I can see all my buttons in a tiny window! I also added a responsive element to the CSS to make the navigation bar twice the height when the screen size is small.

I feel that I have reached some small level of nirvana. It has only taken several weeks and many lost hours of development to get here.

Update

After getting a Jekyll blogging website to work, I decided that that mountain has been climbed and I’ve torn it down and rebuilt it using R Markdown Website, which I use for my Spatial Data Discovery class.

The example Jekyll site template that I got working is available here (zip) for those brave enough to venture forth.

So long Jekyll, it’s been… emotional.