How Russia Smuggles Stolen Ukrainian Grain / / No Comments Bellingcat has exposed how some Russian cargo ships are managing to circumvent the European Union’s sanctions on the shipment of stolen Ukrainian grain. In its investigation Russia’s Grain Smuggling Fleet Continues Undeterred, the investigative journalism organization tracked and mapped the movements of a Russian-flagged bulk carrier called Irtysh, revealing how it has been smuggling grain Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Grain, Russia, smuggles, Stolen, Ukrainian
Links For You (11/30/25) / / No Comments Once again I’m here, sharing links, and apologizing for the lack of content this month, although I did publish seven times, and I think I had some good demos, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it? 😉 As I’ve hinted recently, I am no longer on the job market! I haven’t said where yet as I wanted to get a few weeks under my belt to ensure things were going to be ok. I’m not going to lie, my last role (and quick lay off) really messed me up a bit. That being said, I feel relatively safe now, and really like what both my role and my coworkers, so I figure it’s time to share! My new role is a Senior Developer Evangelist for Webflow. Webflow has a web-based... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 11/30/25, links
Mapping the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole / / No Comments All of us have, at some time or another, fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. You begin with the noble intention of looking up a single topic, only to find yourself tumbling through an unplanned journey of blue hyperlinks.Start with Geradus Mercator, follow a link to Antwerp, hop over to the Tomorrowland festival, and before you know it you’re reading about Metallica. What began Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Hole, Mapping, Rabbit, Wikipedia
The History of the World Map / / No Comments It has been a boom week for Wikipedia-sourced history maps. In the last five days I’ve reviewed Landnotes & Globe of History, and I’ve now stumbled on another Wikipedia based history map – the Time Travel App.Time-Travel App is a world history explorer that uses Mapbox, OpenHistoricalMap, and data from Wikipedia to let you browse historical events, important people, cultural realms, and even Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: History, World
Links For You (11/16/25) / / No Comments Good morning, programs. I’m sorry for the light posting the last few weeks, but, it’s all for a good reason. Last week was my first week at my new job, which means all of my anxiety and fear are gone. Ok, maybe not, but, I’m absolutely delighted to be off the market again. I haven’t blogged about the new job yet (or even gotten around to updating LinekdIn), but I’ll do so soon. (My job isn’t top secret or anything, I’m just waiting a bit.) Ok, let’s get to the links! A Conditional Form Field Web Component I love web components, and I especially love really practical examples like this conditional form field component by Aaron Gustafson. As you can... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 11/16/25, links
The Map of Human History / / No Comments You wait an age for a historical Wikipedia map and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about Landnotes, we can now explore another Wikipedia-sourced map of human history.The Globe of History is an ambitious new interactive map that attempts to visualize the entire sweep of human history – 6,000 years of wars, inventions, discoveries, philosophers, political Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: History, Human
Gemini File Search and File Stores for Easy RAG / / No Comments I am really excited about this post as it’s one of the most powerful changes I’ve seen to Google’s Gemini APIs in quite some time. For a while now it’s been really easy to perform searches against a document, or a group of documents. You would upload the file (or files), ask your questions, and that was all you needed. However, the files you uploaded were only there temporarily. This was fine for processes like summarization or categorization where you could automate the process and be done with it. This was also fine for basic chat uses. I blogged an example of this last month: "Building a Document Q&A System with Google Gemini". The new features I’m... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Easy, file, Gemini, search, Stores
Using Google Static Maps in Your Print View / / No Comments This is just a quick thought experiment really. Yesterday I was working on a demo that made use of Google’s Static Map API. I’ve blogged about this API for probably over a decade now and I rarely see people use it, but it’s a lightweight, image only "API" for when you need simple map images without interactivity. Honestly, I see a lot of sites using the full JavaScript maps library when a simpler image would be fine. It’s also an excellent way to use maps in presentations or emails as well. It occurred to me that the static map image could be a great way use of print media queries in CSS and I thought I’d build a quick demo to show this. Media queries and... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Google, maps, print, Static, using, View