The Longest View on Earth / / No Comments If you stand on the summit of the Kunlun Mountains, which stretch along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in China, on a clear you should be able to see Pik Dankova – a remote peak in the Tian Shan of Kyrgyzstan – more than 530 km away. According to the All the Views map this is the longest line of sight on planet Earth.Exploring the World’s Longest Views All the Views is Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Earth, Longest, View
Links For You (3/8/26) / / No Comments Greetings, programs. I’m taking a break from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (and being lazy in general) and thought I’d write up my links post. Yesterday was the 15th birthday of one of my kids and later today we get to celebrate with her friends. Outside of that and laundry, I’ve got a large amount of nothing to get accomplished today and I absolutely love it. Let’s get to the links. As always, I hope you find these worth your time! Eleventy’s Future As you know (or hopefully know), my blog here is built on Eleventy, a Node.js static site generator. I’ve been using it, and blogging about it for almost six years. This past week, Zach announced that Eleventy... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/8/26, links
Building My Own Social Network Poster in Astro / / No Comments Today is a big day for Astro, not only do you get Astro v6 (it just released a few hours ago!), you also get one of my demos! Ok, one of these is more important than the other, but, I’m really excited about v6 and hope to have a demo of the new features to share soon. With that being said, I’m also sharing a demo I started work on a few weeks ago and finally wrapped up this past weekend – Social Beast. What is Social Beast Social Beast is a web app meant to be run locally (although I have some thoughts on that restriction and will share at the end) that handles posting to multiple social networks at once. Right now "multiple" is two: Mastodon Bluesky It doesn’t... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, building, Network, Poster, Social
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