Mapping the Great Kantō Earthquake / / No Comments 100 years ago yesterday, on September 1st 1923, the Great Kantō earthquake struck Japan. The earthquake struck near midday, at a time when many people were cooking lunch. In Tokyo, during and after the earthquake, fires spread across the city. In the 46 hours after the quake around 40% of Tokyo burned to the ground. Japanese newspaper Nikkei has marked the 100th anniversary of the Great Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: earthquake, GREAT, Kantō, Mapping
Use XHR/fetch Breakpoints! / / No Comments Web debugging tools are so incredibly excellent these days. I remember the days where they didn’t exist and debugging was a total nightmare, even for the simplest of problems. A while back I introduced many of you to Logpoints, a way to output console.log messages without needing to change the source files. Another great breakpoint type is XHR/fetch breakpoints, allowing you to pause execution when an AJAX call is made. Let’s look at XHR/fetch breakpoints! To set an XHR/fetch breakpoint, open your browser’s Developer Tools and click the Sources tab — the same tab you open for other breakpoints. Under the XHR/fetch accordion item, click the big “+” button.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Breakpoints, XHR/fetch
NIMBY Mapping / / No Comments In July the German government introduced a draft bill to legalize cannabis for personal use. However, under the draft bill, the consumption of cannabis will remain prohibited within a 200-meter radius of schools, children’s and youth facilities, playgrounds, publicly accessible sports facilities, and in pedestrian zones between 7 am and 8 pm. According to the Berliner Morgenpost these Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Mapping, NIMBY
Working with the Storage API / / No Comments Earlier this year at WWDC, Apple announced a whole set of new features coming to Safari in version 17. While that is not out yet, it’s still a pretty large set of updates. I’ve not been shy about my view that Safari has been holding the web back for a while, but I’m happy for any improvements that show up. While looking at the long list of updates, I saw Storage mentioned: WebKit has made some big updates to the storage quota policy. Previously, an origin had a starting storage limit of 1 GB. When exceeding the limit, the subsequent storage operation would fail in Home Screen web apps, or the user would see a prompt asking to increase the quota for the origin in Safari. Starting... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: storage, working
A New Google Map of the Brain / / No Comments If you’ve ever wanted to look inside someone’s brain then you might like the European Commission’s new ‘Google Map’ of the human brain. This new 3D map allows you to take a look inside a human skull and explore atlases of the brain’s regions and neural connections.The European Brain Research Infrastructure (EBRAINS) is funded by the European Commission to accelerate brain research and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Brain, Google
queryLocalFonts / / No Comments One of the larger downloads when requesting a webpage are custom fonts. There are many great techniques for lazy loading fonts to improve performance for those on poor connections. By getting insight into what fonts the user has available, we can avoid loading custom fonts. That’s where queryLocalFonts comes in — an native JavaScript function to gather user font information. queryLocalFonts is an async function that requires user permission via a browser prompt when first executed. queryLocalFonts returns an array of FontData objects which contain information about all available fonts: const localFonts = await window.queryLocalFonts(); // [FontData, FontData, ...] /* { family:... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: queryLocalFonts
ColdFusion Component for Adobe Acrobat Services / / No Comments Last month, I wrote up a post demonstrating how to use Adobe Acrobat Services with ColdFusion. This week I took some of the code I had written for that post and turned it into a proper GitHub project. You can find the latest code here: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/coldfusion-cfc-acrobat-services To use this, you’ll need credentials, which you can get and use for free for up to 500 transactions. (The docs go into detail about how that works.) Currently I only have a subset of our APIs supported, but I plan to hit most of the rest in the next day or so. To give you an example of how it works, here’s a sample that uses our Extract API. First, you instantiate the component with your... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Acrobat, Adobe, ColdFusion, Component, Services
The AI Diplomacy Map / / No Comments According to the interactive map Deeplomacy the “relationship between Iraq and the United States has been turbulent, complex, and marked by periods of conflict and cooperation.” Deeplomacy also informs me that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine has recently “drastically worsened”.Deeplomacy is a new map tool which can explain the historical and current diplomatic relationships between Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Diplomacy