Metro Music Maps / / No Comments Over a decade ago, Alexander Chen’s iconic MTA.me turned Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York subway map into a live, plucking string instrument. On this map every time an MTA train crosses the track of another line, it twangs like a musical string, transforming the frantic energy of New York’s transit grid into a delicate, real-time composition.The itch to turn transit data into music has recently Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, Metro, Music
Links For You (6/21/26) / / No Comments Greetings and salutations, readers. It’s been a few weeks since I shared one of these, mostly due to the job search being somewhat exhausting, but I’ve got a backup of links so it’s time to get back in the habit. And of course, it’s Father’s Day and I want to wish all the dads out there (myself included) a very happy father’s day. This weekend I got to officiate my first wedding (for my brother-in-law and his fiance) so my plan today is to do… nothing. Enjoy your links! Mastodon and Translation with Chrome AI First up is a presentation by Thomas Steiner demonstrating Chrome built-in AI APIs doing language detection and translation for Mastodon. I’m... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 6/21/26, links
Building a Form Handling Service in Val Town / / No Comments Many years ago, I made the switch from building primarily app-server backed sites (using Node, ColdFusion, PHP, etc) to fully static sites using tools like Jekyll, Hugo, and Eleventy. For the most part, it was a great shift in how I build, but there were a few things I had to figure out in that new world – one of them was simple form handling. While I could have used serverless just fine, it felt like overkill. Luckily, there were a few services out there that catered to this need. You would simply use a unique action for your form and that service would handle collecting the form data, emailing it to you, and redirecting the user back to the site. A great example of this, and one I used... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, form, handling, service, Town
How Much Room Does a Mushroom Need? – About 110 Quadrillion Kilometres / / No Comments Beneath your feet is a vast network of fungi. Not merely “quite large” vast, but vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly vast. If every strand of these underground fungal networks were laid end-to-end, they would stretch from Earth to the Sun about a billion times.To put that into perspective, if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you nearly 12 years to cover that distance. Yet Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: about, Kilometres, Much, Mushroom, Need, Quadrillion, Room
Creating a Dynamic Favicon with Cloudinary / / No Comments Ok, chalk this up to something I may never actually use in production, but I was curious how well the browser would handle changing the favicon of a tab on the fly, and combining that with Cloudinary to dynamically modify the source. The inspiration for this was something simple – Google Calendar’s favicon is unique per day, so for example, right now I see this: As there is – at most – 31 days in a month – my assumption is that they simply generated all 31 at some point and in their code serving up the web page, they select the right one. To be honest, it’s subtle and I don’t always notice it, but it’s a nice effect. I decided to take a look... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Cloudinary, creating, dynamic, Favicon
Mapping Every Russian Casualty in Ukraine / / No Comments Vladimir Putin is determined to conceal the enormous human cost of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. As a result, Russians are largely denied an accurate accounting of how many of their friends, relatives, and fellow citizens have been killed.To cut through this fog of war, the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and BBC Russian Service created 200.zona.media, an interactive mapping Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Casualty, every, Mapping, Russian, Ukraine
Dual Maps Goes 3D / / No Comments Dual Maps, an old Maps Mania favorite, has undergone a bit of a makeover this week. As you may have heard, Google recently removed its classic 45° bird’s-eye aerial imagery from the Maps JavaScript API. This oblique aerial perspective was one of the core synchronized views offered by Dual Maps. The removal of the bird’s-eye view has therefore prompted Map Channels to undertake a ground-up revamp Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Dual, goes, maps
Testing Diffbot’s Web Search API / / No Comments It’s hard to believe I first experimented with Diffbot nearly five years ago. You can see that first post up on the Adobe Medium account – Natural Language Processing, Adobe PDF Extract, and Deep PDF Intelligence. Since then I’ve tested out various APIs and features from them and was lucky enough to connect with them recently about a new initiative, a web search API. There’s multiple examples of this out in the wild already, but most just scrape/hack against Google. Google had an API, the Custom Search JSON API (I even covered it back when folks still talked about the JAMStack) but the API is now deprecated and officially turning off January 1, 2027. Diffbot’s API... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Diffbot's, search, Testing