Tripgeo Cities / / No Comments A few months ago Map Channels kindly offered to create a json feed for my Guess This City game. I had been complaining about having to add a new city to the game every day. Map Channels then volunteered to create a feed for the game which gives the name, coordinates, population and a description of a different city each and every day. The result is that Guess This City now updates daily without Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: cities, Tripgeo
Automating Background Removal with Firefly Services / / No Comments As a quick FYI, if you would rather skip reading my text and jump to a video, I’ve got one at the end of this post. Be my guest to scroll down and watch that instead. One of the most interesting aspects of Adobe Firefly Services is what it enables in the automation space. I think it’s fair to say that these automations will still be followed up by a human checking, tweaking, and adjusting results, but if the APIs can save a significant amount of time, that’s got to be a great benefit. Let me demonstrate one simple example of this – removing background images at scale. The Remove Background API The Remove Background API is part of the Photoshop API family and handles the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Automating, Background, Firefly, removal, Services
Pixel View / / No Comments I’ve created a simple game using images from Mapillary (and a couple of images from Wikimedia).Mapillary is a crowd-sourced ‘Street View’ service that allows users to capture, share, and explore street-level imagery from around the world. Developers are allowed to use images submitted to Mapillary under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Mapillary ‘street view’ images can be a great resource for Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Pixel, View
Upgraded to Eleventy 3.0 (Beta) / / No Comments Like I assume most of my fellow Eleventy users have been doing, I’ve been closely following the updates on Eleventy and its progress towards 3.0. As my blog is a fairly large site, I wasn’t in a rush to upgrade to an Alpha release, but the recent beta release convinced me it was time to take the plunge. The TLDR is that… it took me roughly an hour (most of which was by choice, I’ll explain below) and it’s been smooth sailing. Want to know more? Keep on reading… The Upgrade Helper Per the release notes, I made use of the upgrade helper which is a plugin you install along with, of course, upgrading your site to Eleventy 3. This worked well and flagged my only... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Beta, Eleventy, Upgraded
Links For You (8/3/2024) / / No Comments The past few weeks have been a bit crazy, although mostly crazy good. Since the last one of these posts, my family and I went on vacation in San Antonio for a few days, and currently, my wife and I are in New Orleans for a short break. Last night we went to the Postmodern Jukebox concert which was easily one of the most fun concerts I’ve been to. I’ll share one of their clips at the end, but let me just say that they were a real treat live. CSV for Eleventy First up is a great example of why I love Eleventy – its flexibility. This post, "Eleventy – Add CSV data file support" describes how you can use CSV files in Eleventy to drive your content. Eleventy’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 8/3/2024, links
Exploring London Through the Artist’s Eye / / No Comments “… this tide is always moving! Always! When all those people we now see in such activity are in their graves, the same hurried activity will still continue here …” – Hans Christian AndersenWhen Hans Christian Andersen visited London in June 1847 he was obviously impressed by the pace of London life. In his autobiography he called the English capital,”London, the city of cities! … Here is Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Artist's, Exploring, London, through
Help Me Solve an Alpine.js Mystery / / No Comments Yesterday I wrote up my experience in building a simple CRUD interface using Alpine.js, and in doing so, ran into an interesting issue. While it would be best to read the entire previous article, let me try to break down the issue… or at least as how I saw it. My Alpine app had a variable, cats, that was an array of objects. I looped over them and displayed them in a simple table: <template x-for="cat in cats"> Notice I’m using a variable, cat, to represent each element of the array. Here’s one example of using it: <td x-text="cat.name"></td> The application also made use of a cat variable. This was intended to be used in the edit form.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, help, Mystery, Solve
The Best Graphics Team in the World / / No Comments The Straits Times has the best graphics department in the world – probably. The Washington Post and New York Times might be contenders but because of their paywalls most of their work is hidden away from most of the world.The latest astonishing demonstration of the graphic skills of the Straits Times comes in an article celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the construction of the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: best, Graphics, Team, World