The Nicknames of America / / No Comments Some U.S. cities have very quirky nicknames. Apparently, the citizens of Auburn, Alabama like to call their town the ‘Armpit of the Confederacy’. While their nearby neighbors in Gordo, Alabama call their home the ‘Armpit of Civilization’. Elmwood and Belleville in Wisconsin both claim to be the ‘UFO Capital of the World’ (presumably because of all the strange, alien-looking folk living in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, Nicknames
Using Geocoding with Leaflet / / No Comments When I first started talking about Leaftlet, I mentioned how it was "only" a map library, and by that I mean, only able to present a view/wrapper around tiles representing map data. There’s a heck of a lot of services that Google Maps, HERE, and so forth, add on top that won’t be present, things like routing, geocoding, and more. Considering the fact that Leaflet is, again, "only" a client-side JavaScript library, that’s just a fact of life. But I’ve been thinking about how I could integrate Leaflet with such services, and I thought I’d share a demo of just that – adding geocoding to Leaflet. WTF is Geocoding? Simply put, geocoding is converting... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Geocoding, Leaflet, using
ColdFusion Component for Google Gemini / / No Comments This week I had the pleasure to present on Google Gemini at the ColdFusion Summit. If you weren’t able to make it, I do plan on giving the talk again on the ColdFusion Meetup sometime later this year. After the presentation, I took my ‘rough and ugly’ code that called Gemini and decided to wrap it up in a nice ColdFusion component. This allows for (hopefully) easier use. For example: gemini = new gemini(key="your key", model="gemini-1.5-pro");result = gemini.prompt('why is the sky blue?'); And that’s it. The result variable will contain two keys, a raw value that is exactly what Gemini returned, and a text value that narrows down into the text response. Multimodal... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ColdFusion, Component, Gemini, Google
Mapping the Political Landscape / / No Comments Waves of Interest is a deep dive into Google search trends during election years. This beautiful data visualization maps out which political topics capture the attention of Americans during US election years. And where!By using the clever visual metaphor of a topographic map Waves of Interest transforms political interest into an intuitive landscape. The visualization reveals the fall Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Landscape, Mapping, Political
The Geotastic Daily Challenge / / No Comments Can you beat me on today’s Geotastic Daily Challenge? I am currently 89th in the Geotastic Daily Challenge with a combined score of 24,263. Do you think you have what it takes to claim a higher spot on the leaderboard than the mighty ‘gmap’?Geotastic is yet another online geography game that challenges players to identify locations around the world using Google’s Street View imagery. Every day Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: challenge, Daily, Geotastic
Links For You (9/28/24) / / No Comments Hello dear readers. I wish I could say I’ve got a restful weekend in front of me, but today we’re driving to New Orleans to pick up our eldest who has been in Germany for a year, and tomorrow we fly to Las Vegas for the Adobe ColdFusion Summit. Both are things I’m quite happy about, but it’s going to be a lot. I’m currently sitting, drinking coffee, and watching "Grey’s Anatomy", a good guilty-pleasure show. Before we get into the links, a few quick reminders. If you aren’t already a subscriber, use the form below or here to sign up for my mailing list. Right now it’s just tied to my posts and as a subscriber, you’ll get an email... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 9/28/24, links
Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text / / No Comments Earlier this month, I discussed how Chrome’s upcoming built-in AI support was adding new features specifically tailored to certain use-cases. In that post, I looked at the Summarizer API. For today, I decided to take a look at the rewriter API. As a quick reminder, this is very early on, and if you want to try this yourself, you should hit the sign-up form and read the intro post from the Chrome folks first. Obviously, everything I’m going to show below probably will, almost certainly will, change before shipping. Ok, with that out of the way, let’s talk rewriting, specifically, how the Chrome API operates. Given a set of source input, the API can shorten, or lengthen the input,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, Rewrite, text, using
VersaTiles Free Map Tiles / / No Comments Looking for a free, flexible way to create custom maps? You’re in luck! Having only recently discovered one free source of interactive map tiles in OpenFreeMap, I have now uncovered VersaTiles. VersaTiles provides a full open-source toolkit for creating and sharing map tiles, all powered by OpenStreetMap data – and with no corporate strings attached!VersaTiles map tiles can be used in most Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: free, Tiles, VersaTiles