I threw thousands of files at Astro and you won’t believe what happened next… / / No Comments Ok, forgive me for the incredibly over the top title there. Yes, it’s clickbait, but I’m also tired after a very long week and feeling a little crazy, so just go with me here a bit, I promise it will be worth it. I was curious how well Astro could handle a large amount of data and I thought – what happens if I threw this blog (well, the Markdown files) at it and tried to render out a site? Here’s what I did wrong and what eventually worked (better than I expected). Round One I began by creating a soft link locally from my blog’s repo of posts to the src/pages/posts of a new Astro site. My blog currently has 6742 posts (all high quality I assure you). Each one looks... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, believe, files, happened, Next, thousands, threw, Won't
Mapping Every Ancient Site in Greece / / No Comments Whether you are planning a trip to Greece, researching ancient civilizations, or simply exploring the geography of the classical world, you should enjoy the Archaeological Atlas of Greece.I have a huge soft spot for historical cartography, especially when it involves rescuing data from “old-school” interfaces and making it more accessible. Which is why I’m drawn to the Archaeological Atlas Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Ancient, every, Greece, Mapping, Site
Links For You (2/8/26) / / No Comments Happy Superb Owl Day! As my team didn’t even get close to the playoffs, I’ll be rooting for the Seahawks, but even more so, hoping for a fun game. Tomorrow I head out to Vegas for my first offsite with Webflow, and the first in-person company event I’ve been too since Auth0 nearly a decade ago. I’m looking forward to meeting my teammates in person and meeting new people. Now – to the links! Adding Touch to PowerShell A few months back, I traded in my Windows laptop (it was having horrible hardware issues) and moved back to Mac. I’ve gone back and forth over the years, and even when I was on Windows for my personal machine, my work laptop was usually a Mac,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2/8/26, links
Pinning Photo History to the Map / / No Comments You are about to become a digital time-traveler with OpenMediaMap. There’s an undeniable nostalgic thrill in stumbling upon a century-old photograph of your own neighborhood – spotting the ghosts of buildings long gone or recognizing the outlines of streets that still exist today. By mapping vintage images, OpenMediaMap makes it possible to explore these moments geographically and experience the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: History, Photo, Pinning
Creating Reddit Summaries with URL Context and Gemini / / No Comments A while ago, the Gemini API added a feature to help work with URL content, URL Context. Previously you had to fetch and download the HTML of the page and pass it to the API. This feature allows Gemini to request content (with limits) from public web pages. I thought it would be interesting to test this against Reddit. In the past I’ve made use of Reddit’s APIs, but as they’ve pretty much destroyed access to those APIs, I thought this could be a good work around. Here’s a simple demo I built. My demo parses the Astro subreddit, specifically the new feed, and asks for a summary of items that seem to require a developer’s help, as well as items that may be critical... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Context, creating, Gemini, Reddit, Summaries
The Flight Sim Globe / / No Comments Flight Tracker Demo | Source on GitHub Flight Tracker is an impressive Three.js project that simulates global air traffic in real time. While the visualization is currently powered by simulated flight data, the developer has indicated plans to integrate real-time feeds in the future. For now, if you are interested in real-time flight tracking maps you can view Flightradar24 and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: flight, Globe
Building a Bluesky Sentiment Dashboard with Alpine and Chrome AI / / No Comments Good morning, programs! Today I’m sharing yet another example of Chrome’s on-device AI features, this time to demonstrate a "Bluesky Sentiment Dashboard". In other words, a tool that lets you enter terms and then get a report on the average sentiment for posts using that word. I actually did this before (and yes, I forgot until about a minute ago) last year using Transformers.js: Building a Bluesky AI Sentiment Analysis Dashboard. I also built this for Twitter, before it went down the toilet, killed off API access, etc. etc., but I can’t seem to find it in my archives so maybe I’m hallucinating. That being said, earlier this week I thought I’d try building... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine, Bluesky, building, Chrome, dashboard, Sentiment
Introducing GeoCards – A Wiki Labeled Map / / No Comments GeoCards I’ve seen many ‘vibe-coded’ wiki maps lately. Most follow the same blueprint: they use your location to surface nearby Wikipedia markers. While that works, I wanted a wiki map where the map itself is the gateway. So I built my own wiki map. On GeoCards, every label – from cities and rivers to roads and landmarks – is interactive. Instead of asking ‘What’s near me?’, GeoCards answers Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: GeoCards, Introducing, Labeled, Wiki