How Maps Save Lives / / No Comments Fifty thousand people were killed on February 6, 2023, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern and central Türkiye and northern and western Syria. The Night the Earth Shook, Strangers Started to Draw tells the story of how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and thousands of volunteers responded by rapidly creating detailed maps to support rescue efforts. The Night the Earth Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Lives, maps, save
Turning my Cursor Performance Work into a Repeatable Skill / / No Comments Yesterday, I wrote about using Cursor to review my blog for performance. Cursor (and again, for full disclosure I work here now 😉 did a dang good job of finding performance issues with my site, handling the huge size and various languages, platforms, and so forth. As I said, it worked well, but I wanted to look into making this more of a repeatable process. I’m saying "repeatable", not "automated", on purpose here. I can automate the process, but a full performance review feels much more like something I should run when I think it makes sense, for example, when I know I’ve tweaked my blog at the ‘code’ level versus writing cat-related blogs. I do... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 'turning, Cursor, into, performance, Repeatable, skill, work
Asking Cursor to Review My Blog for Performance / / No Comments Last week I decided to try something interesting. I opened my blog up in Cursor and asked for a basic performance review. That seems like a no-brainer, but keep in mind, my blog’s source code clocks in at near seven thousand files (ignoring node_modules of course), so this wasn’t some small request. My blog is built with the Eleventy static site generator. It’s a mix of JavaScript and Markdown primarily, with a huge portion of the codebase being Markdown and not ‘code’ per se, but me rambling on about cats and Star Wars. There’s also Liquid templates which are parsed into HTML by a JavaScript library. But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. In Eleventy,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Asking, blog, Cursor, performance, review
Mapping the Light: Sunrise & Sunset / / No Comments Sunrise and Sunset is an interactive map that displays the sunrise and sunset times for any location on Earth, for any day of the year. It also visualizes the sun’s altitude throughout the seasons.By moving the white dot around the calendar ring, you can change the date to view how daylight hours shift across the year. A yellow curve tracks the sun’s altitude above the horizon from dawn to Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Light, Mapping, Sunrise, Sunset
Links For You (7/5/26) / / No Comments In my last links post, I hinted that I may have some good news on the job front, and if you follow me on LinkedIn you already know that I’ve signed on to my next gig. Tomorrow morning I’ll share on here (and on LI) details about the new gig, but I am beyond excited about this new job. With that out of the way, how about some happy links for what’s going to be a really dang good week? JavaScript in the Shadows As one of the new proposals for JavaScript, the ShadowRealm API is pretty interesting. It allows for the creation of a realm, or in my mind, an environment, with JavaScript that is 100% disconnected from the main environment of your browser window. Mat Marquis gives a great... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 7/5/26, links
Rainbow Nation / / No Comments The New York Times has published An American Mosaic, an interactive map visualising the self-identified ancestry of Americans using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The map is accompanied by an article which explores how today’s America reflects centuries of immigration and migration.The map uses colour to show the dominant ancestry in each census tract, drawing on Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Nation, Rainbow
Building Custom Form Selection Boxes – Working on Accessibility / / No Comments Whenever I find myself needing to update a previous blog post, I either correct it inline and add a small note on top, for small tweaks, or write a whole new piece for larger changes. My last blog post talked about how to use CSS to style a "block" such that it acted like a form radio button. When I worked on that demo, I was a bit worried about accessibility. I did one quick check with an online tool, and thought I was ok. I was not. When I shared my post on LinkedIn, Kevin Bonett shared this feedback with me: I would argue that, despite using correct semantic HTML, the “custom” radio buttons are inaccessible. If you’re a sighted keyboard user, how will you know... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: accessibility, Boxes, building, custom, form, Selection, working
Building Custom Form Selection Blocks – no JS, all CSS / / No Comments I apologize for what may be a slightly misleading title. The topic for this post is something I’ve had on my list of things to explore for some time now, and while I wait for the new job to start, I’ve found myself with time to kill. Let me explain what I’m talking about and hopefully it will make a bit more sense. You are, dear reader, familiar with form controls and how to build forms both big and small. One type of user interface I’ve seen from time to time is the ability to select an item where the "item" is an arbitrary block of code. What do I mean by that? Typically a choice element in a form is either a select, checkbox, or radio set. But I’ve seen... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Blocks, building, custom, form, Selection