Florida’s Waffle House Index Score / / No Comments In the wake of Hurricane Milton, which made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast with devastating winds and flooding, emergency responders are working to assess the damage. One unconventional but, some argue, effective tool for gauging the situation is the “Waffle House Index,” a metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to evaluate the severity of storms and guide disaster Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Florida's, House, Index, score, Waffle
Generating Illustrated Stories with AI / / No Comments A few months ago, I built a little demo that I simply forgot to actually talk about here. A coworker was building something similar and it reminded me to take a look at the code, update it, and actually share it. This is a pretty cool example of integrating multiple different APIs to create a final product, in this case, a short story with pictures. Here’s an example: How was this built? At a high level: Google’s Gemini AI is used to generate a short story. Adobe’s Firefly Services is used to generate the images. Adobe’s Acrobat Services is used to turn the text into a PDF. That’s the high level, now let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Generating a Story To... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Generating, Illustrated, Stories
Custom Markers with Leaflet / / No Comments As I continue to dig into Leaflet, I was recently asked about custom markers based on data, so for example, some locations for a store may use one icon while others use another. I did some digging, and while it turns out Leaflet has deep support for customizing markers, it does take a little bit of work. Here’s what I found. First off, this is the default marker: Out of the box, this is it. Period. I can appreciate the library wanting to keep its size to a minimum, but I was a bit surprised. That being said, the library provides really flexible support for creating your own markers. The first thing I found was the tutorial, Markers With Custom Icons. In this tutorial, they describe the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: custom, Leaflet, Markers
The American Election & the Rest of the World / / No Comments With the world closely watching the U.S. 2024 election, what could a Trump or Harris presidency mean for international stability? From rising tensions in Eastern Europe to critical climate action, the global implications of the U.S. election stretch far beyond American borders.The European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) has been exploring “how a Trump or a Harris presidency Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: American, election, Rest, World
Eleventy 3.0 Released (and in use here!) / / No Comments This is just a quick note to let my readers know that Eleventy 3.0 has been released. This is a huge update and folks using it should read the full release notes here: Eleventy v3.0.0: Possums ❤️ ESM. I’ve been running a beta for a while. You can see the issues I ran into here: Upgraded to Eleventy 3.0 (Beta). I upgraded to the final version yesterday and ran into one issue, a template that output to a path without an extension. This was very clearly detailed in the error I got: [11ty] Problem writing Eleventy templates:[11ty] The template at './src/webfinger.liquid' attempted to write to './_site/.well-known/webfinger' (via `permalink` value: '.well-known/webfinger'), which is a target... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Eleventy, Here, Released
The Nicknames of America / / No Comments Some U.S. cities have very quirky nicknames. Apparently, the citizens of Auburn, Alabama like to call their town the ‘Armpit of the Confederacy’. While their nearby neighbors in Gordo, Alabama call their home the ‘Armpit of Civilization’. Elmwood and Belleville in Wisconsin both claim to be the ‘UFO Capital of the World’ (presumably because of all the strange, alien-looking folk living in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, Nicknames
Using Geocoding with Leaflet / / No Comments When I first started talking about Leaftlet, I mentioned how it was "only" a map library, and by that I mean, only able to present a view/wrapper around tiles representing map data. There’s a heck of a lot of services that Google Maps, HERE, and so forth, add on top that won’t be present, things like routing, geocoding, and more. Considering the fact that Leaflet is, again, "only" a client-side JavaScript library, that’s just a fact of life. But I’ve been thinking about how I could integrate Leaflet with such services, and I thought I’d share a demo of just that – adding geocoding to Leaflet. WTF is Geocoding? Simply put, geocoding is converting... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Geocoding, Leaflet, using
ColdFusion Component for Google Gemini / / No Comments This week I had the pleasure to present on Google Gemini at the ColdFusion Summit. If you weren’t able to make it, I do plan on giving the talk again on the ColdFusion Meetup sometime later this year. After the presentation, I took my ‘rough and ugly’ code that called Gemini and decided to wrap it up in a nice ColdFusion component. This allows for (hopefully) easier use. For example: gemini = new gemini(key="your key", model="gemini-1.5-pro");result = gemini.prompt('why is the sky blue?'); And that’s it. The result variable will contain two keys, a raw value that is exactly what Gemini returned, and a text value that narrows down into the text response. Multimodal... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ColdFusion, Component, Gemini, Google