The D-Day Map Room / / No Comments The Map Room at Southwick House in Portsmouth was where Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower and General Montgomery spent much of early 1944 planning for D-Day. The walls of the Map Room were hung with huge maps of the English Channel. Maps that are still in place in the Map Room at Southwick House to this day.In particular one wall of the Map Room is covered by a very large map of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: DDay, Room
Links For You (7/13/2024) / / No Comments Hello from the incredibly hot Pacific Northwest. This week I discovered that not every part of the PNW looks like Seattle. I’m in Bend, Oregon, which is incredibly beautiful, but also just as hot as back home. On the flip side, the humidity is basically zero and the mornings and evenings are incredibly nice. My wife and I are up here for a few days as a quick break, and last night we saw a great concert featuring Ratboys, The Head and The Heart, and the Decembrists. Now to your links – enjoy! Slash Pages # First up is not a directory of horror fansites, but rather, a list of the many different types of "slash pages". These pages follow a similar URL scheme (like /now or... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 7/13/2024, links
Creating a Generic Generative Template Language in Google Gemini / / No Comments I’ve been a fan of ‘random text’ for some time. "Random text" is a bit vague, but to me the idea of using code to generate random stories, or even snippets, is fascinating. Back in April, I blogged about how I created short dragon-based stories. It took a generic string: A #adjective# dragon lives #place#. She #verb# her hoard, which consists of a #number# of #thing#, #number# of #thing#, and #number# of #thing#. She feels #feeling#. And created a story by replacing the pound-wrapped tokens with real words. I used a couple of different tools to build this, but the core one was a cool little Node library named random-word-slugs. It’s a powerful random word library... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: creating, Gemini, Generative, Generic, Google, Language, Template
John Snow’s Proximity Mapping / / No Comments I’ve probably seen over 100 modern interactive visualizations of John Snow’s famous map of cholera victims during the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho. John Snow’s map shows the locations of cholera deaths clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. The map helped to disprove the prevailing miasma theory on the spread of diseases and establish that cholera was actually spread by contaminated Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: John, Mapping, Proximity, Snow's
Cat Herder V1 Released! / / No Comments It’s been a few weeks since I blogged about Cat Herder, my latest web game, but over the holiday break I plugged up the last few features missing and decided it was time to "release" it, and by release, I mean set the version number to 1 and see what happens next. Since my last post in June, I’ve made a few small changes here and there, but the biggest updates in this last release revolve around the cats, and how you get more of them. As I mentioned in my previous posts, I wasn’t really sure about making cats "purchasable", that just didn’t feel right. Instead, I went with a system that kind of works like levels in a RPG. The more purrs you get (which... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Herder, Released
The Car Free Cities Atlas / / No Comments The cyclists of Helsinki have the best access to protected bike lanes of any citizens in the world. 94% of people in the city live within 300m of a protected bikeway. This means that Helsinki scores number one out of the 1095 cities ranked in the Atlas of Sustainable City Transport.The new Atlas of Sustainable City Transport ranks and maps cities around the world based on how easy Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: atlas, cities, free
(Don’t) Add BASIC Support to Eleventy / / No Comments So yesterday I wrote up the process of adding the Squirrelly template language to Eleventy. It was, essentially, five minutes of work due to how well Eleventy supports adding custom languages. After writing it up, publishing it, and running some errands, a really bad and silly idea came to me… what if I added BASIC support to Eleventy? Way back in the Stone Age, my first computer language was Applesoft BASIC on an Apple 2e (or +, not sure). Just look at this rad machine and imagine it paired with a monochrome green monitor: By Bilby – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11119727 I wrote a lot of programs on that machine, most typed by hand from the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BASIC, don't, Eleventy, Support
Building a Web Version of Your Mastodon Archive with Eleventy / / No Comments A couple of days ago Fedi.Tips, an account that shares Mastodon tips, asked about how non-technical users could make use of their Mastodon archive. Mastodon makes this fairly easy (see this guide for more information), and spurred by that, I actually started work on a simple(ish) client-side application to support that. (You can see it here: https://tootviewer.netlify.app) This post isn’t about that, but rather, a look at how you can turn your archive into a web site using Eleventy. This is rather rough and ugly, but I figure it may help others. Here’s what I built. Start with a Fresh Eleventy Site # To begin, I just created a folder and npm installed Eleventy. I’m using the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Archive, building, Eleventy, Mastodon, version