The Nuclear War Simulator / / No Comments At 8am this morning France launched a surprise nuclear attack on the United States.France claimed that it had no alternative but to try and bring about regime change, claiming that US leaders were ‘Deranged scumbags who have been killing protestors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!’The United States responded to this unprovoked nuclear strike by launching its own nuclear weapons Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Nuclear, Simulator
Testing Live Content Collections in Astro V6 / / No Comments Yesterday, Astro V6 formally launched. I say "formally" as it’s been available to test for a little while, but with me still being pretty new to Astro I’ve kept to the main release only. Now that V6 is the default, I thought it was time to dig into it a bit. One feature in particular stood out as being really useful to me – live content collections. One of the reasons I’ve been digging Astro so much is that it nicely straddles the SSG world and Node.js server worlds. When building your app, you can make logical decisions about what should be done at build time versus what should be done dynamically. It’s like having Express and Eleventy rolled into one... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Collections, Content, live, Testing
No Flock Cam Driving Routes / / No Comments DeFlock Flock cameras are AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. The cameras have sparked strong debate because they create a large network that records people’s movements.They:Photograph every passing vehicleRead the license plate number automaticallyIdentify vehicle details (color, make, model)Record the time and locationUpload the data to a shared cloud databaseYou Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: driving, Flock, Routes
Dynamically Adjusting Image Text for Contrast / / No Comments Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my favorite JavaScript libraries, Color Thief, had gotten a major update. Color Thief examines an image and can tell you the dominant color as well as the five most used colors. I thought this was pretty cool, and over the past, I kid you not, 14 years, I’ve blogged about it a few times: Demo of Color Palettes and PhoneGap – from way back in 2012 Capturing camera/picture data without PhoneGap – in 2013 Drag and drop image matching search at Behance – do people still use Behance? New Camera Hotness from Chrome – "new" as of 2017 Building a Progressive Color Thief – this was me exploring... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adjusting, Contrast, Dynamically, Image, text
Using Astro for a Combined RSS View and Generator / / No Comments Ok, before I start, let me just clarify this demo is kind of a remix of my earlier post about building an RSS aggregator in Astro. I did run into some interesting issues this time around though and I figured it was worth a share. At Webflow, our developer docs are separated into different sections per product. For most of our developer products, we’ve got changelogs. So for example, here’s the changelog for our Data APIs and here’s one for our MCP server. We try to be good stewards of our developer community and ensure we document everything as clearly as possible. Each of our changelogs has an RSS feed as well so if you’re using a feed reader, it’s an easy to keep... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Combined, Generator, using, View
The Iranian Missiles Map / / No Comments The Iranian Missiles Map Modern missile warfare is framed as precise, calculated, and technologically controlled. But “precision” in military terms does not mean what most people think it means. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, Tehran retaliated by striking Israel and U.S.-linked military sites across the region, including in Gulf states that host American forces. Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Iranian, Missiles
Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies / / No Comments My wife and I both love going to the movies, but sometimes a few months will go by without us making it out there. Mostly we just forget what’s coming out and don’t realize till it’s already on a streaming app. I thought it would be nice to build a tool that could help remind me of upcoming movie releases so we can make our theater going more of a consistent habit. To accomplish this, I used the The Movie Database APIs and Val Town. The First Version Before I even considered building a tool like this, I investigated the TMDB reference to see how easy it was to get upcoming releases. Turns out, there’ve got an endpoint just for that: Upcoming Movies If you carefully read... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Movies, Town, using
How to Create an Interactive Conceptual Map / / No Comments The 2026 Gorton and Denton Byelection Map In The Map of Human Happiness I reviewed a conceptual interactive map created by The Pudding to visualize the results of a 2017 research project. Here is how you can create your own conceptual maps using the Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator with the MapLibre mapping library.This project combines world-building tools with modern web mapping to create a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Conceptual, create, Interactive