Using Chrome AI to Summarize Comic Books / / No Comments A few weeks back, I blogged about analyzing comic books with gen ai, and honestly, it worked really darn well. I extracted the pages with Python, and send them to Google Gemini to create the summary. I was naturally curious to see if this could be done entirely on device, using Chrome’s AI support. Here’s what I found. First, a reminder – a few days ago I updated my web-based comic book reader and described that process. The code I’m sharing today is built upon that first application, so if you missed that post, I’d strongly suggest reading it first. (And if you don’t want to miss any of my posts, don’t forget to subscribe!). How It Works Alright –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Books, Chrome, Comic, Summarize, using
How Google Maps Works / / No Comments Google Maps Explained is an awesome walkthrough that breaks down how Google Maps figures out the best route when you ask for directions. The star of the show is Geo, a cute little green guide who walks you through the behind-the-scenes magic that makes Google Maps so smart. At the heart of Google Directions is some seriously clever tech – powerful pathfinding algorithms. These are Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Google, maps, works
Testing with BoxLang / / No Comments One of the fun things about immersing myself in BoxLang these past few months is my expose to other products from Ortus. Most recently, I’ve been doing some contracting with a client that makes use of ColdBox, which for my non-CFML readers out there is probably the most well known, and probably most popular, framework for building enterprise web applications with ColdFusion. As part of that work, I’ve been integrating TestBox, a testing and mocking framework that works well with ColdBox, but also (somewhat recently, I think a month or so now), supports BoxLang as well. For the most part, "it just works", but as I was new to it, I did run into a few small issues I thought... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Testing
Losing BIG, Very SAD! / / No Comments The Economist has mapped President Trump’s approval rating in each state, and the results look bleak for the president and the Republican Party ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Drawing on data from YouGov polling, The Economist finds that Trump holds a positive net approval rating in only 11 states.In its cartogram of Donald Trump’s Approval Rating, the magazine shows that the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Losing, very
Integrating Algolia with BoxLang / / No Comments I’ve been using Algolia for my search on this blog for years and absolutely love the service. At a high level, Algolia is a hosted search service that lets you easily create search indexes (think of it as a search optimized version of your content) while also providing easy libraries to add a search UI to your page itself. If you type in the search bar on top and perform a search, you’ll see this yourself. My site here is static, all simple flat files with no database, so a solution like Algolia is vital. I thought I’d take a look at integrating Algolia’s REST APIs with BoxLang and was able to build a quick demo in less than an hour. Here’s what I did. Initial Setup As... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Algolia, BoxLang, Integrating
My Experience Asking GenAI to Design My Blog / / No Comments What was my experience using GenAI tools to design my blog? Well, you’re looking at it! As I mentioned last week, my new design came from one of my experiments using GenAI to help me design a new theme, but I wanted to share a bit more about the experience when I had time, and that time is now. About two or so months ago, I had the idea of testing out GenAI to create themes for small web apps. While my blog is actually huge (near seven thousand pages), design wise it’s basically: A home page A post page A "everything else" page That’s just three basic pages, all sharing a main layout with slight differences in what’s the main content of the page. I thought... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Asking, blog, design, Experience, GenAI
What States Would You Live In? / / No Comments Last year I created the World Level O map for Tripgeo. This fun travel-tracking tool colors the countries of the world based on whether you have lived there, stayed for a while, visited, passed through or never been. You are then awarded a level based on how well you’ve “covered” the globe.States I’d Live In is a map in the same sort of personal tracking ballpark. However on this map Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: live, States, Would
Links For You (9/13/25) / / No Comments Yeah, I’m not even going to try to comment on this past week. I can say I had two interviews, which I think went well, and I finished some demos I’ve been working for a while, so that’s a positive. Outside of that, just want to not think too much about the state of things and focus on sharing awesome, nutritious links for you to enjoy. Intl and Segmenters You know me and you know I love the Intl API, so first up is a look at getting accurate text lengths using Intl and the Segmenter feature. This post comes to us from Sangeeth Sudheer with the nicely named "Automagic" blog. Flight Data to the Database Next up is an incredibly cool post that demonstrates streaming real-time... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 9/13/25, links