A Panorama of Victorian London

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The city of London has inspired many beautiful panoramic maps over the centuries, each lovingly crafted by talented artists. Interestingly, these panoramas almost always share a common perspective – north from the south side of the River Thames. This same viewpoint is used in Frederick James Smyth’s 1844 Panorama of London.Exeter University’s Digital Humanities Lab has created an interactive Maps Mania… more →
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Finding Your Next Amusement Park Ride with APIs

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Every now and then I’ll wonder if something or another has an API, google for it, and be pleasantly surprised to find that there is indeed an API available. This week that random thought was about ride waiting times for amusement parks. To be fair, it wasn’t completely random. I saw an ad on Facebook for a little display you can get for your home that shows live wait times. Obviously that’s targetted for amusement park freaksfans but it’s a cute idea and something I’d consider. I’ve only recently become a Disney fan (you don’t want to know how much I freak out at Galaxy’s Edge) so I get the attraction. In this case, my googling landed me on Queue... more →
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A Test of Eleventy Fetch

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It has been quite some time since I wrote about Eleventy. My last post was a quick announcement about me upgrading my site to Eleventy 3.0 and how well that worked. I was going through my list of blog ideas and realized that in March of 2022, yes, 2022, I wrote down that I should take a quick look at Eleventy Fetch: I knew it worked, but I was curious about a few things, for example, invalidating the cache, but apparently this idea got buried and forgotten about until… today! So yes, it works, and works really well and if that’s all you care about, hit up the docs and you’re good to go. I had to see this for myself though. My API I began by creating a quick HTTP-based API... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

The 2024 Sea-Level Rise Map

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The 2024 U.S. Sea Level Report Cards from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) reveal that Gulf Coast states, particularly Louisiana and Texas, continue to experience some of the fastest rates of sea-level rise in the country.Published annually, the VIMS sea-level report uses observed tide gauge data to track sea-level trends across the United States and project future changes based Maps Mania… more →
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Pixel Art via Vibe Coding

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I am 100% against the term "vibe coding". To be clear, my issue is with the name, it just strikes me as, well, horrible. That being said, I’ve been using gen AI to generate code samples over the past few months and it’s been incredibly interesting at times. It absolutely requires technical skill to evaluate the results and to help guide the AI when mistakes happen, but it’s been fun to give this a few tries recently. This morning I gave Claude’s desktop app a try and gave it what I thought was a non-trivial prompt: can you generate JavaScript code that will look at an image in the DOM and convert it to simplified pixel art? I then submitted the prompt and stood... more →
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The Marine Migration Map

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tracked migrations of the Green Turtle Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO) is an interactive map visualizing the global migrations of more than 100 species of birds, mammals, turtles and fish. The aim of the map is to bring together knowledge about the migratory routes and connected habitats of marine species, such as marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles, and fish, in order to help Maps Mania… more →
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Adventures in Vibe Coding – Really, Really Big Numbers

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I continue to be really against the term ‘vibe coding’, but also continue to be fascinated by the idea of working with GenAI to help craft/enhance applications in an iterative, conversation-based manner. Ashley Willis recently released an incredibly well done post on the topic, "What Even Is Vibe Coding?", where she goes into detail on her take on the term and what it means for the industry. I think it is an excellent post and I want to highlight one part that really resonated with me: It scaffolds layouts, creates routes, fills in placeholder content, basically roughs out the shape of the thing I described. I still review it, refactor it, test it, and shape it into something... more →
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A Sneak Peek at BoxLang’s Module Feature

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Last week I attended and spoke at Into the Box, a conference hosted by the Ortus folks, the company behind BoxLang. While there, I attended a talk from Brad Wood on how BoxLang’s module system works. I’ve been using modules with BoxLang since I first started playing with it. It’s how database support is added, mail, PDF, and more. You can see a list of currently released modules here. I had been curious as to how this works so I was excited for Brad’s presentation. While hearing him go over the details, I got even more excited, and literally built a ‘hello world’ module in a minute or so while he talked. I’m calling this blog post a "sneak peek"... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,
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