Mapsaws – Jigsaws Made from Maps / / No Comments Jigidi is a free online jigsaw game. On Jigiidi you can choose to play thousands of online interactive jigsaw puzzles. If you join Jigidi you can also create your own interactive jigsaw puzzles. Many members of Jigidi have of course already made some fun jigsaw puzzles out of maps.Here are three OpenStreetMap jigsaw puzzles for you to try created by Karlos. These include a 330 piece jigsaw of a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: from, Jigsaws, Made, maps, Mapsaws
Working with CloudCannon and Eleventy – My Experience / / No Comments I’ve been working with the Jamstack (in its various iterations and names) for many years now. In that time, one area I had not really looked into is the use of a content management system (CMS). I recently had a chance to look into how CloudCannon adds CMS capabilities to Eleventy and I thought I’d share my experience. I went in, admittedly, a bit concerned. One of Eleventy’s greatest strengths is its flexibility. Unlike other Jamstack solutions that have a proscribed way of doing things, Eleventy is incredibly open to how it can be used to build a site. My assumption was that it would be difficult for a CMS to "grok" a particular Eleventy implementation and support... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: CloudCannon, Eleventy, Experience, working
Dot Maps of the Chicago Mayoral Race / / No Comments Brandon Johnson is set to become the new mayor of Chicago. Johnson beat Paul Vallas in Tuesday’s runoff election with 51.44% of the vote. You can see where people voted for each of the candidates at the neighborhood level thanks to two different dot density maps created from the results of the Chicago Mayoral election.CBS in Breakdown of Chicago mayor vote by precinct has created a combined dot Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Chicago, maps, Mayoral, Race
Awesome Algolia Updates (and some fixes here…) / / No Comments I’ve been a huge fan, and user, of Algolia for a while now. I first wrote about it back in 2020 when I described how I added Algolia search to Eleventy. Later on, I described how one might migrate to Algolia from Lunr. All in all, I’ve been very happy with Algolia and my usage on this blog. Honestly, I feel like I’m the only one who makes use of my search page but I do so nearly daily so it’s critical to me. (And recently, a friend reached out specifically about my search and I’ll discuss that below.) The only real issue I ran into when using Algolia here was the size of my content. Algolia’s free tier maxed out at ten thousand records. That’s very generous... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Algolia, awesome, Fixes, Here, Some, updates
The 100 Most Boring People in America / / No Comments Who is the most unnotable person in your town?I asked ChatGPT to find me the most unnotable people in America’s biggest towns and cities. The results can be seen on my Unnotable People map. On this map the placename labels of the 100 largest towns and cities in the USA have been replaced with each town’s most insignificant person.Using ChatGPT to find each town’s most unnotable person means Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, Boring, most, people
How to Block a Range of IP Addresses / / No Comments As much as content creators want traffic to their website, there is such thing as the wrong type of traffic. Sometimes it’s content scrapers, sometimes it’s malicious bots; either way, it’s important to know how to block problematic IPs from your site. To block a range of IP addresses using an .htaccess file, you can use the * wildcard for pieces of the IP address: Order Allow,Deny Deny from 219.198.*.* Allow from all You can also use a regular expression: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^219\.198\.\. RewriteRule ^ - [F] Don’t let known attackers and problematic bots bring your website to a halt! Be quick to check your site logs and ban addresses that... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Addresses, Block, range
The Electric Vehicle Driving Test / / No Comments Electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular, as people look for ways to reduce their environmental impact. But what are the pros and cons of electric vehicles compared to gas cars? And are all electric vehicles created equal? The San Franicisco Chronicle has created an interesting route planning tool which can help drivers compare the likely travel time and cost of taking any car Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: driving, Electric, test, Vehicle
Adobe Firefly in Beta / / No Comments I’m currently at Adobe Summit and this morning at the keynote we announced the beta of Adobe Firefly. Firefly is a generative AI service, which by itself isn’t new, but Firefly has a strong commitment to being a more responsible AI service. You can read more about that and Adobe Sensei here if you would like. As an Adobe employee, I’m obviously biased, but the focus on having a responsible service that respects creators feels like a pretty important differentiator. While there are a lot of good uses for this, I decided to have some fun with it and see how well it would do something business-critical… with cats. For my test, I looked up a list of Dungeons and Dragons classes... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adobe, Beta, Firefly