Using Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs for Screenshots / / No Comments I’ve been a Cloudflare fan for a while now, but have mainly focused on their Workers Serverless platform. I was aware, of course, that they did a lot more, but I just haven’t had the time to really look around and explore. Recently I was doing some investigation into "url to screenshot" services and discovered that Cloudflare had this, and not only that, it’s part of a suite of browser APIs that are really freaking awesome. Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs do things like: Get the HTML of a page, but after JavaScript has executed, allowing it to get dynamic HTML Render a PDF to PDF Scrape HTML via selectors Parse out content via JSON schema (I’m absolutely... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: APIs, browser, Cloudflare's, Rendering, Screenshots, using
Find Your Birthday Tree / / No Comments Every year, the city of San Francisco plants a tree to celebrate my birth. Well, not just one – each year, it plants several. So far, the city has planted 455 trees on my birthday. And now, thanks to the thoughtful residents of San Francisco, there’s an interactive map that shows the exact locations of all my birthday trees.If you’re curious, you can view the locations of all my birthday trees Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: birthday, Find, Tree
Adding CORS to Your BoxLang APIs / / No Comments CORS, or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, has been the bane of my existence at times. Don’t get me wrong, I get the idea behind it. I get why it’s necessary. That being said, I tend to forget about it until I write some client-side JavaScript code that gets hit by it. With that in mind, I thought I’d quickly demonstrate how to build CORS-enabled APIs with BoxLang. It’s incredibly simple, which is good, but you’ll want to keep it in mind when building out your own APIs. What and Why? I’m not going to repeat the full description of CORS available from MDN, but it basically boils down to a security feature in browsers. When executing code on your domain that makes... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, APIs, BoxLang, CORS
The Walk Management System / / No Comments 🥾 The Walk Management System: I’ve decided to walk the length of the Jubilee Line on the London Underground. But before setting off, I figured I needed a WMS (Walk Management System) to help plan and document each stage of this epic hike.With a little help from ChatGPT and MapLibre GL, I’ve built a lightweight web app that lets me create, edit, and view walking routes – complete with Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Management, system, Walk
Parsing Markdown in BoxLang – Take 2 / / No Comments A long, long time ago, ok, it was last Thursday, I posted about adding Markdown processing to BoxLang via the Flexmark Java library. After posting it, a few folks were curious why I didn’t use the native import process instead of createObject('java', '...') and the answer was simple – I just didn’t think about it! To give you an idea of the difference, let’s first consider the initial version: function markdownToHTML(str) { // .init() is important! ds = createObject("java", "com.vladsch.flexmark.util.data.MutableDataSet","flexmark-all-0.64.8-lib.jar").init(); ps = createObject("java", "com.vladsch.flexmark.parser.Parser","flexmark-all-0.64.8-lib.jar").builder(ds).build();... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Markdown, Parsing, take
Links For You (4/19/25) / / No Comments Normally I preface these posts with little updates and such, but I’m too busy today and am sitting on what could (possibly) be good news. So, let’s just get right into the links, shall we? Translating Live Streams in Real-Time with On-Device AI Models I’ve been real excited about Chrome’s upcoming AI on device efforts, so when my buddy Todd Sharp wrote up a cool demo of it, I had to share. In his post, Todd describes using on device transcription of a video source that then makes use of Chrome’s new AI feature to perform translation on the viewer’s side. Obviously this only works in Chrome Canary, but as an option in the future when it’s mainline, this... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 4/19/25, links
The Hotness Map No One Needed / / No Comments LooksMapping is a digital map that rates restaurants not by food or service, but by the attractiveness of their clientele. It scrapes millions of Google Maps reviews, runs each reviewer’s profile photo through an AI model trained to score “hotness” out of ten, and then color-codes restaurants accordingly – red for hot, blue for not.LooksMapping feels like a relic from a digital past – with the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Hotness, Needed
Build Your Own Localized Events Calendar using Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph / / No Comments Finding out what’s going on in your city can be a bit of a chore. For me, I use a combination of Facebook, specifically accounts for local organizations and news channels, and our local Reddit forum. This is… haphazard at best. I’m sure local "city wide" calendars exist, but I’m not aware of any that is used by the majority of folks nor do I trust them to actually cover everything going on. Having played with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph last month ("Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph"), I thought I’d do some digging to see what would be possible via their API. Here’s what I was able to... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Build, calendar, Diffbot's, events, Graph, Knowledge, Localized, using