Mapping the Big Map Index / / No Comments The Economist’s Big Mac Index compares the purchasing power parity between the currencies of different countries by examining the price of a Big Mac hamburger sold at McDonalds’ restaurants in each country. The Index “is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity, the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalize the prices of an identical Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Index, Mapping
PDF Embed Web Component Available Via NPM / / No Comments Earlier this month, after being motivated by Thomas Steiner, I went through the not-really-a-hassle process of publishing <table-sort> to NPM. (Table-Sorter Available Via NPM) Today I’ve done the same for another web component, <pdf-embed>. This component wraps Adobe’s PDF Embed API, which, honestly, isn’t an API, but a JavaScript library to embed PDFs inline with the rest of your document. Given this HTML: <pdf-embed url="https://documentservices.adobe.com/view-sdk-demo/PDFs/Bodea Brochure.pdf" width="100%" height="500px" key="33f07f2305444579a56b088b8ac1929e"><p>Read our cool PDF <a href="https://documentservices.adobe.com/view-sdk-demo/PDFs/Bodea... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: available, Component, EMbed
Adding Your Buttondown Email Stats to Your Website / / No Comments I’ve been using Buttondown for almost a full year now (I blogged about the setup here). After having a few issues with Mailchimp and my newsletter, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Buttondown was and how quick it was to set up. I ended up paying for it as I knew I’d end up paying for some solution and Buttondown worked great and wasn’t expensive. For a while now, I’ve had a custom-built stats page on my blog that’s primarily built for me. It reports on multiple different parts of my site and its biggest use is to let me quickly judge how well I’m keeping to my publishing schedule (a post a week). One stat it didn’t have that I’ve been checking... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Buttondown, email, Stats, Website
Some More Maps of Sounds / / No Comments Yesterday Hacker News featured a thread on Sounds of the Forest, an interactive map of sound recordings made in forests around the world. Also linked in the Hacker News thread was the wonderful Radio Aporee, which, like Sounds of the Forest, has featured on Maps Mania before. Also mentioned in the thread were two interactive sound maps which I haven’t seen (or heard) before.Audiomapa Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, More, Some, Sounds
The Treats of San Francisco / / No Comments The California Migration Museum is celebrating one of the wonderful benefits of living in a multi-cultural city with a new interactive map of San Francisco’s food scene. Melting Spots: An Immigrant Map of San Francisco Food showcases some of the many immigrant-inspired dishes in the city which have added richer flavors to the city’s food scene.Did you know, for example, that the Mai Tai, the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Francisco, Treats
Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD / / No Comments It’s pretty well known now that most, if not all, recipes on the internet are 90% crap and 10% actual recipe, at best. Obviously, there are outliers of course and obviously, if you are sharing your recipes online you are free to do so as you see fit, but speaking for myself, when I click a link to a recipe my assumption is that I’m going to have to "work" to figure out where the actual details are amongst the humorous backstories and other tidbits that don’t actually tell you how to make what you’re trying to make. That’s why I love apps like Saffron. Not only is it incredibly minimal and laser-focused on recipes, it has an incredibly good "recipe... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: JSONLD, Node.js, Pipedream, Recipes, Scraping, using
Using JSON Schema with Google Gemini / / No Comments Back about a month ago, I wrote up a post on how to generate JSON results using Google Gemini, "JSON Results with Google Gemini Generative AI API Calls". While you should read that post first, the process basically boiled down to: Setting the response type of the result to JSON. Without this, Gemini will return JSON but encoded in Markdown. Using a System Instruction to give directions on the "shape" of the JSON, i.e., use this key and that key. While these techniques work well, recently yet another feature was added that makes this even better, JSON schema support. JSON Schema is an abstract way to define the shape of JSON and can be really useful in validation. The website... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Google, JSON, Schema, using
The Lost Pathfinder Game / / No Comments The Lost Pathfinder is a new online game which requires players to connect a path from one side of map to the other.At the beginning of each round of The Lost Pathfinder you are presented with an isometric grid on which all the road tiles have been mixed up. All you have to do is to rearrange the road tiles in order to complete a path from one side of the map to the other. To help you restore Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Game, Lost, Pathfinder