Links For You (4/26/26) / / No Comments I was supposed to post this last week (I try to keep to a schedule of every two weeks), but I didn’t get around to it because… nope, that’s it. That’s the reason. Because. And that’s good enough, amiright!?!? The heat is slowly cranking up here in Louisiana and I’m dreading the full on summer, but things do slow down a bit when the kids aren’t in school and that’s something I greatly appreciate. Before getting into this weeks links, I was reminded a few weeks back that my wife actually reads my posts so… hi baby, I love you. Super useful web components FTW – <form-saver> First up is a really simple and really useful web component,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 4/26/26, links
The World is Your Canvas / / No Comments Pixtera is a brand new browser-based collaborative pixel art map that turns the whole world into a shared canvas. Built on MapLibre and OpenStreetMap data, it lets users zoom into real locations and start drawing directly onto the map in pixel form.New players begin with 100 free pixels in their energy store, which can be placed on the map one by one. Used pixels gradually regenerate at a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: canvas, World
Where Europe Is Emptying / / No Comments CORRECTIV’s latest story map, Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, is a superb example of how large-scale spatial data and clear visual design can come together to tell a nuanced geographic story. In this case, the story is one of Europe’s rural depopulation and how emigration and demographic decline have reshaped entire regions since the end of the Cold War.The map draws on newly harmonised Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Emptying, Europe
Building a Simple Markdown PWA App / / No Comments While I didn’t share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need – I work with Markdown files all the time but didn’t have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me – the size of the bundled app. I created both a Mac and Windows distribution and both were around 90 megs. That’s not huge of course, but still felt like a lot for what could – in theory –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Markdown, simple
Google Night View / / No Comments To ensure the highest quality Street View imagery for navigation, Google almost exclusively captures the world in broad daylight. But as any seasoned map-nerd knows, every system has its glitches. La Noche Cíclica is a fascinating Google Map project that highlights the rare, eerie, and often accidental moments when Street View goes dark. You can view the project’s documented night views simply Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Google, night, View
Summarizing Docs with Built-in AI / / No Comments Back in January of this year, I blogged about on-device summarization of PDFs: Summarizing PDFs with On-Device AI . In that post, I made use of Chrome’s Summary API and PDF.js to create summaries of PDFs completely within the browser. I thought I’d take a look at extending that demo into more document types, specifically Office. And even more specifically – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here’s what I came up with. officeParser FTW So here comes the fun part. Last weekend I had this demo completely done using a few different libraries. Then – earlier this week one of the developer newsletters I subscribe to shared officeParser. This nifty library handles Office, PDF,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Builtin, Docs, Summarizing
what1tune – Musical Addresses / / No Comments Over the years, we’ve seen countless ways to navigate our world using various geohashing solutions. These systems – such as the popular what3words (which assigns three random words to every 3-meter square), or Google’s Plus Codes – aim to provide a simplified, human-readable way to identify precise locations where traditional street addresses fall short, such as in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Addresses, Musical, what1tune
How Livable is Your Street? / / No Comments Strado is a new interactive mapping tool designed to provide objective livability scores for 50 major European cities, powered entirely by OpenStreetMap data. By clicking on any street on the Strado map, users receive a Livability Score and an Activity Score derived from an assessment of 22 different categories.How it WorksStrado analyzes the density of Points of Interest (POIs) to rank Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Livable, Street