Adding a Guestbook to Your Jamstack Site (Yes, Seriously) / / No Comments Don’t do this. I’m serious. Or do it, I certainly don’t listen to reason when it comes to building demos. I’ve been in web development for a very, very long time, and I’ve seen many trends come and go. Guestbooks were a way for folks to leave a comment on your site as a whole. I haven’t seen one in ages, but some still linger. In fact, Ana Rodrigues has an absolutely lovely guestbook driven by Webmentions. And if you really want to, you can still download a Perl CGI guestbook over at Matt’s Script Archive. I haven’t written Perl in decades, but I absolutely loved it back in the 90s. That being said, I had a free hour yesterday, was bored, and decided,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Guestbook, Jamstack, Seriously, Site
The Chain Restaurants of America / / No Comments Map of McDonald’s outlets in the USAThe Georgia Institute of Technology’s Friendly Cities Lab has released a new interactive map which reveals which chain restaurants dominate which areas of the United States. The U.S. Chain and Independent Restaurants map shows the locations of over 700,000 restaurants across the country, organized by restaurant chain and by frequency. The map reveals that Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, chain, restaurants
Using Generative AI to Organize Video Game Screenshots / / No Comments Way back in January (remember January), I wrote a blog post describing how to use gen ai to improve image filenames. This worked by uploading the image to Google Gemini, asking for a short description, and using that description for a new filename. Recently I was thinking about that demo and was curious how well it would work for video games. As always, I did a few quick tests in Google AI Studio. I did some quick Googling for various games and screenshots, and the results were pretty impressive. Here are three mostly modern examples: And here’s a first failure, identifying this as Final Fantasy 14, not 16. It did well for one really old game, although to be fair the name is in the picture: Although... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Game, Generative, Organize, Screenshots, using, video
Google Gemini 1.5 Announced (and more new features) / / No Comments In general I don’t tend to blog about stuff that isn’t quite out yet, but as I’ve got early access (and permission to share), and as it’s pretty darn cool, I thought I’d share. Plus, some of the new stuff is available to everyone, so you can try it out as well! Today, Google introduced its newest language model, Gemini 1.5. You can, and probably should, read the marketing/nicely polished intro by Google here, but I thought I’d share some highlights and examples here. I’ve had access to this for a grand total of four hours so please consider this my first initial impressions. As the title says, this is not yet released, but you can sign up for the waitlist... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Announced, features, Gemini, Google, More
The Right-Wing Terrorism Map / / No Comments The RTV Map Tool is an interactive map showing incidents of right-wing terrorism and violence in Western Europe since 1990. It documents and shows the locations of 1,214 violent right-wing attacks in Europe. This includes acts of violence which led to 32 fatalities.The map was created by the Center for Research on Extremism, at Oslo University, which studies right-wing extremism, hate crime and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: RightWing, Terrorism
Google Gemini as Your Dungeon Master / / No Comments So this is absolutely just another example of me playing around too much, but I had to share. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, Google’s AI Studio now supports uploading files and working with them in your prompt. Today I decided to give the Chat interface a try as I hadn’t yet played with it. On a whim, I googled for "dungeons and dragons rules PDF" and… well, you won’t believe what happened next. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) First off, the most important thing to note if you want to test with PDFs, ensure that they are OCRed. Right now AI Studio does not handle that well, but it should be corrected in the future. My Google search turned up the PDF here,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Dungeon, Gemini, Google, master
The Sad State of Local News 2023 / / No Comments Northwestern University’s The State of Local News Outlook is an interactive map which visualizes the number of surviving local newspapers in every county in the United States. On this local news map individual counties are clored to show whether the county has 0, 1 or 2 or more news outlets. The data shown on the map can also be filtered to show the number of local number of newspapers, Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 2023, local, News, State
How to Override width and height HTML attributes with CSS / / No Comments One of the HTML elements that frequently comes into collision with CSS is the img element. As we learned in Request Metrics’ Fixing Cumulative Layout Shift Problems on DavidWalshBlog article, providing image dimensions within the image tag will help to improve your website’s score. But in a world where responsive design is king, we need CSS and HTML to work together. Most responsive design style adjustments are done via max-width values, but when you provide a height value to your image, you can get a distorted image. The goal should always be a display images in relative dimensions. So how do we ensure the height attribute doesn’t conflict with max-width values? The answer... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: attributes, height, HTML, Override, width