Did You Win the Global Lottery? / / No Comments Are you feeling lucky? You probably should be. Based on where most Maps Mania readers are located, there’s a good chance you’ve already won the birth lottery.The Birth Lottery map makes global inequality tangible by illustrating how much our quality of life depends on chance. With a single spin, the map randomly “re-births” you somewhere in the world based on real statistics. It poses a simple Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Lottery
War Atlas: Mapping 3,500 Years of Conflict / / No Comments War Atlas is an interactive, web-based map that visualizes 8,500+ historical battles spanning from around 1500 BC to the present day – providing users with a guided historical tour of human conflict.At its core, War Atlas is an interactive timeline-driven map. Users can select a specific war, explore through time using a slide control or through inputting a specific year, and see battles Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 3500, atlas, conflict, Mapping, Years
Where are the Most Expensive Houses? / / No Comments Homes Are Expensive is an interactive map that can help you find the cheapest and most expensive places to buy a property in the United States. The house prices are based on data from Zillow listings.The map visualizes property prices across the USA using data scraped via hasdata.com in November 2025, and provides a comprehensive look at the 1.85 million homes currently on the market. What makes Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Expensive, Houses, most
Links For You (1/10/26) / / No Comments Happy 2026, programs! As this is the first Links For You for the year, I figure it may be good to remind folks why I write these. Social media can be a great place to share links with folks, but it’s very much hit or miss. Someone may share something incredibly cool that you would love to boost, but if you miss it, you’re out of luck. I subscribe to many listservs that share good tech links, but a while ago I thought it would be cool to share and promote links I thought were especially cool. Obviously that’s pretty opinionated, but that’s why you’re here, right? Each of these posts will have three links, typically but not always tech related, and a fourth entry that... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 1/10/26, links
Adding Hardcover.app Data to Eleventy / / No Comments It’s been far too long since I shared an Eleventy tip, and to be fair what I’m showing today can be used anywhere, but hopefully this will be useful to someone else out there. I enjoy tracking my media consumption, specifically movies and books. For movies I’ve been real happy with Letterboxd (you can see my profile if you wish). For books, I used Goodreads for a very long time, but have wanted to migrate off the platform and switch to something else. There’s alternatives, but none really worked well for me. Earlier this week, an old friend of mine (hi Jason!) suggested Hardcover. This is a Goodreads competitor built, in their own words, out of spite, and I can totally... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, data, Eleventy, Hardcover.app
A New Year’s Flight Around Planet Earth / / No Comments On New Year’s Day, I released a small virtual fireworks show to celebrate the start of the year. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung then put my effort to shame by publishing an impressive orbital tour of the entire planet on the same day – recorded by the International Space Station.Illuminated Cities and Northern Lights: A New Year’s Flight around the World around the World is a guided Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: around, Earth, flight, Planet, Years
Turning Recipe Data into an Astro Content Collection / / No Comments As I continue to dig into, and learn, Astro, I thought I’d take a look at creating custom content collections. Content collections are pretty much exactly how they sound – collection of content items you can use within your Astro site. If you go through the excellent Astro tutorial you will find this discussed at the end in the final optional step step. Content collections aren’t required – you can build dynamic sets of data just using file system operations (and that’s how the tutorial has you build the blog) – but they make it easier (imo) to re-use content throughout the site. I encourage you to check out the docs, but generally content collections come... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 'turning, Astro, collection, Content, data, into, Recipe
Mapping Global Migration Patterns / / No Comments Where do people around the world live today – and where were they born?The new Global Migration Map lets you explore international migration patterns using the United Nations’ International Migrant Stock 2024 dataset. By clicking on any country, you can discover where people living there originally came from, or where people born there now live – and how many people moved between each pair of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Mapping, Migration, Patterns