The Destruction of American Democracy / / No Comments Thanks to Soar you can watch the destruction of American democracy in near real-time. The animated GIF above shows satellite imagery from before and after Trump’s illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House. The republic that built a White House of reason and restraint is now being demolished by its would-be king. Only one man could believe that the neoclassical and Palladian Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: American, Democracy, Destruction
Adding Generative Summaries with Chrome AI / / No Comments Earlier this year (sigh, when I had a job), I built a demo using Chrome’s built-in AI support to do something I thought was really interesting – progressively enhance product reviews to make it easier to see which were trending negative versus positive. It was a great example (imo!) of how AI support could enhance the experience in supported browsers without impacting the experience for others. That demo was on my mind this week, and it occurred to me that it would also be a great place to add summarization. The Summarizer API is now fully released, for Chrome that is, and does not need a flag enabled or anything like that. I’ve blogged about this API a few times already, most... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Chrome, Generative, Summaries
County Stripes / / No Comments County Stripes I was reading the comments on a time-lapse map of power outages in the US posted on Reddit yesterday. Many of the comments focused on the sizes of U.S. counties, particularly noting how counties appear to get noticeably larger as you travel westward across the country.I therefore decided to take a closer look at the size of U.S. counties across the country, carrying out some Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: County, Stripes
No Kings, No Tyrants & No Dictators / / No Comments The No Kings interactive map is not particularly interesting in itself – except as a visualization of the huge geographic sweep of anti-Trump sentiment in the United States. The map is ostensibly just a simple interactive map that shows you the locations of today’s protests against the escalating authoritarianism of the Donald Trump administration in the United States.As well as showing the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Dictators, Kings, Tyrants
Links For You (10/12/25) / / No Comments I blinked and somehow missed posting this a week or so ago. Time is, to quote the good Doctor, a bit wibbly wobbly. I’m currently watching a recording of the Saints/Patriots game and hoping we can follow last week’s win with another, but I’m not sure. Of course, the game’s been done for hours now but we’ve managed to miss the news so… we can still hope. Speaking of hope, as a reminder, I’m still looking for my next role, and if you know of a good developer evangelist/advocate position, please reach out! Alright, time for some links. When JSON Isn’t… First up is a great look at how JSON may not be as universally parsed/transferable/etc as you... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 10/12/25, links
Upcoming Speaking Engagements, and Code Break / / No Comments With full-time employment being a bit up in the air this year, I’ve not submitted to nearly as many conferences as I have in the past (but hey, my rejections are at an all-time low!), but I’ve actually got not one, but two upcoming talks this month. First up I’ll be giving an introduction to BoxLang to the Mid-Michigan CFUG user group on October 21st. You can find details here, https://mmcfug.org/. This meeting is 100% open to the public so if you’ve been curious about BoxLang from my posts here, you can get yourself a good intro later this month. Next, and this is somewhat new for me, but I’ll be giving a presentation on something near and dear to my heart, developer... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Engagements, Speaking, Upcoming
How to Create a Birdsong Map / / No Comments Diario SUR has created an interactive that allows you to listen to Málaga birds singing directly from a map. Mouseover any of the markers on This is how Málaga sings and you can listen to a sound recording of a Málaga bird species submitted by users of the website Xeno-Canto.Xeno-Canto is a community-driven online Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Birdsong, create
BoxLang Quick Tips – Better Web Debugging / / No Comments Today’s BoxLang Quick Tip is incredibly quick, but also, really darn useful and something I had wished I knew earlier. The BoxLang MiniServer is a lightweight web server that you can use to test your web applications. I say lightweight but it’s gotten some really good improvements over the past few months, including flexible URL rewriting. Today I’m going to talk about something that’s going to be really useful to those of you who, like me, make mistakes from time to time. As with most of my BoxLang Quick Tips, you can skip to the video version at the bottom of the post. Let’s consider a BoxLang web application that consists of a grand total of one file: <bx:script>... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: better, BoxLang, Debugging, Quick, tips