Creating a Generic Generative Template Language in Google Gemini / / No Comments I’ve been a fan of ‘random text’ for some time. "Random text" is a bit vague, but to me the idea of using code to generate random stories, or even snippets, is fascinating. Back in April, I blogged about how I created short dragon-based stories. It took a generic string: A #adjective# dragon lives #place#. She #verb# her hoard, which consists of a #number# of #thing#, #number# of #thing#, and #number# of #thing#. She feels #feeling#. And created a story by replacing the pound-wrapped tokens with real words. I used a couple of different tools to build this, but the core one was a cool little Node library named random-word-slugs. It’s a powerful random word library... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: creating, Gemini, Generative, Generic, Google, Language, Template
John Snow’s Proximity Mapping / / No Comments I’ve probably seen over 100 modern interactive visualizations of John Snow’s famous map of cholera victims during the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho. John Snow’s map shows the locations of cholera deaths clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. The map helped to disprove the prevailing miasma theory on the spread of diseases and establish that cholera was actually spread by contaminated Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: John, Mapping, Proximity, Snow's
Cat Herder V1 Released! / / No Comments It’s been a few weeks since I blogged about Cat Herder, my latest web game, but over the holiday break I plugged up the last few features missing and decided it was time to "release" it, and by release, I mean set the version number to 1 and see what happens next. Since my last post in June, I’ve made a few small changes here and there, but the biggest updates in this last release revolve around the cats, and how you get more of them. As I mentioned in my previous posts, I wasn’t really sure about making cats "purchasable", that just didn’t feel right. Instead, I went with a system that kind of works like levels in a RPG. The more purrs you get (which... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Herder, Released
The Car Free Cities Atlas / / No Comments The cyclists of Helsinki have the best access to protected bike lanes of any citizens in the world. 94% of people in the city live within 300m of a protected bikeway. This means that Helsinki scores number one out of the 1095 cities ranked in the Atlas of Sustainable City Transport.The new Atlas of Sustainable City Transport ranks and maps cities around the world based on how easy Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: atlas, cities, free
(Don’t) Add BASIC Support to Eleventy / / No Comments So yesterday I wrote up the process of adding the Squirrelly template language to Eleventy. It was, essentially, five minutes of work due to how well Eleventy supports adding custom languages. After writing it up, publishing it, and running some errands, a really bad and silly idea came to me… what if I added BASIC support to Eleventy? Way back in the Stone Age, my first computer language was Applesoft BASIC on an Apple 2e (or +, not sure). Just look at this rad machine and imagine it paired with a monochrome green monitor: By Bilby – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11119727 I wrote a lot of programs on that machine, most typed by hand from the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BASIC, don't, Eleventy, Support
Building a Web Version of Your Mastodon Archive with Eleventy / / No Comments A couple of days ago Fedi.Tips, an account that shares Mastodon tips, asked about how non-technical users could make use of their Mastodon archive. Mastodon makes this fairly easy (see this guide for more information), and spurred by that, I actually started work on a simple(ish) client-side application to support that. (You can see it here: https://tootviewer.netlify.app) This post isn’t about that, but rather, a look at how you can turn your archive into a web site using Eleventy. This is rather rough and ugly, but I figure it may help others. Here’s what I built. Start with a Fresh Eleventy Site # To begin, I just created a folder and npm installed Eleventy. I’m using the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Archive, building, Eleventy, Mastodon, version
The Riskiest Places to Live in America / / No Comments Los Angeles County is a dangerous place to live. According to the National Risk Index the residents of Los Angeles County are more likely to suffer from a natural hazard than anywhere else in the United States. The residents of Los Angeles County are more likely to experience an earthquake than any other US location. They also have one of the highest chances of experiencing a landslide and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, live, Places, Riskiest
Working with Pasted Content in JavaScript / / No Comments This began as me wanting to build an Alpine.js application that handled pasted input, but I realized before I looked into handling this with Alpine, it made sense to start with basic vanilla JavaScript at first. I’ve worked with the clipboard before, mainly storing information to it, but this was the first time I looked at handling input from the clipboard. The web platform handles it rather nicely, but as with most things, there are a few interesting things you need to be aware of. Here’s what I found. Listening To the Event # The first thing you need to do is actually listen to the event. While you probably listen on a part of a DOM, it made the most sense to me to listen at the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Content, JavaScript, Pasted, working