A Fair Election Map for the Midterms / / No Comments Will there be fair elections on November 3rd? I can’t promise that, but Karim Douieb can promise a fair election map. His 2026 House Forecast Map replaces the standard geographical congressional district map with one where every district is equal in size. Click the “One seat, one cell” button, and the map morphs from a ‘geographic map into one where each state is resized by its seats and every district gets the same area.’ Reading the Battlefield The interactive map synthesizes data from the Cook Political Report, categorizing all 435 House seats according to race competitiveness ratings: Solid / Likely / Lean Democrats: 214 seats Solid / Likely / Lean Republicans:... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: election, Fair, Midterms
Generating PDFs from Word Templates with officeParser / / No Comments I’ve been singing the praises of the officeParser library for a while. It’s an open source JavaScript library that can parse, extract, and convert between PDFs and Office documents, as well as OpenOffice, ePub and more. My demos have all focused on client-side examples but obviously the library would work great in a server side workflow as well. I haven’t worked at Adobe for years now, but I still get strangely excited working with documents. I’ll just add that to the long list of reasons I’m a big nerd. A few weeks ago, I reached out to Harsh Ankur about an idea inspired by Adobe’s Document Generation API. This was probably my favorite API in their suite of... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: from, Generating, officeParser, PDFs, Templates, Word
Building the Unicorn-themed app of my dreams with TinyJS / / No Comments Everyone likes to talk about light versus dark theme while no one is addressing the real need for our users – a proper unicorn theme. I mean, take a look at this beauty: This is Uninote, a desktop note taking application that – well – takes notes. You create notebooks, write notes, and that’s it. No AI features. Nothing complex, just a note taking app. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with these apps for years. I was a huge Evernote fan until it went to poo. I currently use OneNote and… it’s ok but I wish it was better. And yes, before folks chime in with suggestions, I’m aware I’ve got choices, but I "share" note access with... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, dreams, TinyJS, Unicornthemed
The World’s Most Notable Places. / / No Comments Do you remember the World’s Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I’d build a World’s Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map. Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. The idea behind the dataset is simple but powerful: OpenStreetMap tells you where things are and provides their geographic shapes, while Wikimedia projects can tell you what they are, why they matter... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: most, Notable, Places, world's
Adding a PDF Display to Eleventy / / No Comments This will be a short one. I’ve talked about embedding PDFs on web pages for probably close to ten years now. Blame Adobe. Blame me being a nerd and finding this stuff interesting. Blame whoever. While I’ve blogged about the topic, I’ve also actually done that on my site here, in a variety of different ways. A while back I realized I wasn’t being consistent with how I did… "stuff" here, like call outs, Youtube links, etc. I started a guide doc so I’d have a quick way to remember what I did last time, and be more consistent. One item on there I had left as "figure it out later" was proper PDF embedding. This week I finally nailed that down.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, display, Eleventy
There are 89,603 Dogs in New York City / / No Comments There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City. Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog’s name, breed and birth year, along with the owner’s ZIP code. Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city’s dog population has changed over time. Using the map you can search for a breed, a dog’s name, or a neighborhood to discover where your pooch would fit in – and where they would stand out from the crowd. The map is colored by the most common dog breed... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 89603, City, Dogs, there, York
Links For You (10/19/26) / / No Comments Wowza – I’m like nearly a month late on this. This is where I’d try to come up with a good excuse, but I think if I just randomly point around at things and said… "life" most of you would completely understand where I’m coming from. It’s been a difficult few months for myself, and for nearly every person I know. This week I’m going to try focus on the positive and the things that make me smile, and I hope all my lovely readers can do the same! Make Music, Not War First up is the appropriately named Hyperblam, a music making tool that lets you use a declarative language to create sick beats as the kids say. What does that look like? Here’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 10/19/26, links
What America Looks Like After 700 Meters of Sea Level Rise / / No Comments Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters? The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters – meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment. If you’re looking to explore actual, science-backed climate projections rather than wild cartographic extremes, Climate Central’s Coastal Risk Finder is probably a better sea level rise map. However, Sliding Shores does offer a more... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: after, America, Level, like, looks, Meters, Rise