Noah’s Ark found on Vintage Maps / / No Comments For thousands of years, cartographers have been mapping more than just the known world. Medieval and early modern maps often mixed observed geography with religious beliefs, folklore and mythical stories, placing legendary cities, lost kingdoms and biblical locations alongside real-world places. Mythical Tours is a fascinating narrated journey through this imaginary geography, using centuries of historical maps to track down the locations of places that many people today believe exist only in legend. Among the mythical locations you can discover are the lost city of Atlantis, Hy-Brasil (the phantom island supposedly located off the west coast of Ireland), and even the legendary city of... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Found, maps, Noah's, Vintage
Getting Structured Data from Web Pages with AI and Re-usable Specs / / No Comments As I say from time to time, every now and then I build something as a proof of concept and the result is… ok? I’m not really sure if the idea actually made sense and if the final result is usable, but the exploration was interesting enough that I think it warrants sharing with you good people. That’s what today’s post is. This demo all began with a simple idea – how do you handle getting RSS like content from a site that doesn’t actually have an RSS feed? This typically relies on looking at the page as data to be parsed. For a while now, there have been multiple good ways to turn a web page into structured data. As an example, AgentQL lets use a GraphQL-like... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: data, from, Getting, Pages, Reusable, Specs, Structured
How Poland Drifted to the West / / No Comments Today’s #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons. At the risk of starting World War III, I’ve created a map of Poland’s Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland’s borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap. The map includes three snapshots: the semi-autonomous Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815, the Second Polish Republic immediately before the German and Soviet invasions of 1939, and the post-war borders established in 1945. But rather than simply displaying these three historical boundaries, I thought it would be interesting to use turf.js to calculate how much territory... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Drifted, Poland, West
Links For You (11/1/26) / / No Comments Happy Sunday, and happy "Saints have a bye week so they can’t lose" day. That may be bitter and I shouldn’t write off their season yet but… maybe next year? Of course, this is just one more kinda crappy thing going on amongst a giant pile of other crappy things so – let’s just get right to the links, shall we? When job hunting turns into a security lesson Everyone knows the job market is hell now, and to be honest, hell may be a bit too kind. Now imagine you are considering a job, download a take home test, and discover it’s actually a hack attempt. Appaji C. details the attack here: "I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 11/1/26, links
How to Navigate the Roman Empire / / No Comments The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high. The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes. Unlike a modern geographical map, the Tabula Peutingeriana makes little attempt to represent the world to scale. Its extraordinary elongated shape, with the Mediterranean compressed into a narrow strip,... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Empire, navigate, Roman
How the World Draws the World / / No Comments I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines. In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the crowd draws every country. This multiple-map visualization animates between each country’s actual borders and a composite outline created from all the players’ attempts to... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: draws, World
Generating PDF Invoices from Word Templates with officeParser / / No Comments Last week I shared a demo ("Generating PDFs from Word Templates with officeParser") that made use of the awesome officeParser open source library. That demo was a simple "customer report" web app that took custom data and a Word template. Once the form was submitted, the library converted tokens in the Word template to real data and output a PDF. I decided to build another demo using the library, this time on the server with a simple Node.js script. As I mentioned previously, this new feature mimics Adobe’s Document Generation API. At the time I wrote my blog post, the library just supported simple transformations. So given “ in your Word template, if you passed... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: from, Generating, Invoices, officeParser, Templates, Word
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