Kangaroos Don’t Vote – People Do

If ever an election needed a cartogram map, it was the 2025 Australian federal election. If you were to view The Australian’s Electorate Map – 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking the Liberals had cruised to a landslide victory. This traditional cartogram election map is visually dominated by the blue of the Liberal Party. It also appears as if the Labor Party (shown using salmon pink) Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

Links For You (5/3/25)

Happy Saturday, Happy Pre-May the 4th, and happy "I don’t have to beg for a job anymore". Yep, I’ve got a job. I’m going to be announcing where and what later this month when I start, but, finally, I can stop the hunt. Oh, and the crippling fear and despair being gone is an added bonus. So, happy day! Let’s get to the links. Tubes, tubes, tubes Last week I started off with a post from Todd Sharp so why not do it again? Todd wrote up his experience using Momento Topics API and Nixie Tubes. Nixie Tubs are beautiful steam punk looking tubes that can be connected to hardware and then changed programmatically. I did a bit of hardware hacking last year but the project... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Code Break Back for May

Hey folks, after a break last month (for reasons), I’m happy to announce that Code Break is back on schedule. I’m ditching any further exploration of React for now, but instead turning my attention to something I think is really fun – building desktop apps. This first session will focus on a JavaScript-based framework while my next one will cover using Python. My next session will not be on a Tuesday, but Monday, May 5th, at 12PM CST. You can RSVP/sign up/etc here: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-05052025/ I hope to see you there! Raymond Camden… more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Mapping the Sudanese Civil War

Two years into Sudan’s civil war, the country remains gripped by a humanitarian catastrophe and a relentless power struggle that has devastated lives and reshaped its landscape. What began on April 15, 2023, as a clash between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has since escalated into a nationwide conflict. With over 14 million people displaced Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

19th Century Street View of Chicago

Imagine stepping straight into the heart of history – and finding yourself surrounded by the wonders of 1893. The Chicago 00 Project makes it possible, weaving authentic vintage photographs of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago into a breathtaking, time-traveling Street View adventure!For example, click on the White City Court of Honor map marker, and you are transported into Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

Creating a PDF Book from Markdown with BoxLang

Recently I’ve done some blog posts on BoxLang involving Markdown and PDFs, and I was curious if I could put together something that really demonstrated a complete tool of some sort. With that in mind, I built a "book" system where you can author pages in Markdown and use a BoxLang CLI script to generate a resulting PDF. It’s more a POC than a real app, but it was pretty fun to build. Here’s what I did. Functionality At a high level, the book is created from a source of Markdown files. Each Markdown file can use front matter (data on top) to define variables that are evaluated at the time the book is created. You can also use a "global" data file to define... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Using Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs for Screenshots

I’ve been a Cloudflare fan for a while now, but have mainly focused on their Workers Serverless platform. I was aware, of course, that they did a lot more, but I just haven’t had the time to really look around and explore. Recently I was doing some investigation into "url to screenshot" services and discovered that Cloudflare had this, and not only that, it’s part of a suite of browser APIs that are really freaking awesome. Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs do things like: Get the HTML of a page, but after JavaScript has executed, allowing it to get dynamic HTML Render a PDF to PDF Scrape HTML via selectors Parse out content via JSON schema (I’m absolutely... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Find Your Birthday Tree

Every year, the city of San Francisco plants a tree to celebrate my birth. Well, not just one – each year, it plants several. So far, the city has planted 455 trees on my birthday. And now, thanks to the thoughtful residents of San Francisco, there’s an interactive map that shows the exact locations of all my birthday trees.If you’re curious, you can view the locations of all my birthday trees Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps
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