Progressively Enhancing Product Reviews with Chrome AI / / No Comments While writing up my last blog post I mentioned that a new idea had occurred to me in regards to employing sentimenet analysis with Chrome’s built-in AI support (that, remember, is still way in beta). At lunch today I took a quick stab at a simple demo of what I had in mind and honestly, I’m pretty happy with how it came out. The Initial Demo The idea I had was an "imagined" ecommerce site with product reviews. I went to Google AI Studio and used a prompt to generate a set of product reviews. I used this prompt: Generate a list of 20 product reviews for a cat carrier named Cat Carrier Ultra 1000. The reviews should be a mix of positive and negative, with some being extremely... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, Enhancing, Product, Progressively, reviews
Zero Chance of Rain on Mars Today / / No Comments It’s currently a rather brisk -31 °C at Syrtis Major on Mars. Despite the chill, there’s only a light northerly wind of around 5 km/h. However, if you’re driving on Mars today, you might want to be cautious – visibility is extremely low!This weather report is brought to you by the Mars Explorer Weather Map, NASA’s new dashboard for visualizing atmospheric conditions on Mars.Since the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: chance, Mars, rain, Today, Zero
Links For You (7/27/25) / / No Comments Good afternoon, programs. This past week was… frustrating. Incredibly slow. Don’t really want to get into it but luckily I’ve had a very lazy and relaxing weekend. I’m counting my blessings but – like I said – frustrating. Let’s just get to the links, shall we? Importing JSON is Easier Now Normally when importing JSON into my code, I’ll do a fetch and parse the response into JSON. Not a big deal, but, it’s now simpler as explained by Thomas Steiner on the web.dev blog: "JSON module scripts are now Baseline Newly available". This feature is "Baseline" available means it works in modern browsers. Check the post for a full... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 7/27/25, links
Searching Text in Street View / / No Comments The Pudding has created an amazing data journalism project that allows you to search New York for any word or combination of words. Called All Text in NYC, it’s a remarkable tool that lets you dive into the city’s written landscape – mined entirely from Google Street View images. From shop signs in Queens to murals in the Bronx, it captures the way language is woven into the physical space of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Searching, Street, text, View
Getting Image Insights with Built-in Chrome AI and EXIF Data / / No Comments It’s been a busy few weeks for Chrome’s Built-in AI support. Since the last time I blogged about it, four features have gone GA (which still means they are Chrome only but not behind a flag anymore): Translator Summarizer Language Detector Prompt API (for extensions only) And while announced back at the end of May, Gemma 3n as a model is available in Canary, Dev, and Beta Chrome builds. To be clear, the percentage of folks who can use these new features is still really low, but all of these features also work really well in progressive enhancement, and can be backed up by server calls to an API if need be. I continue to be really excited about the possibilities these APIs unlock,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Builtin, Chrome, data, EXIF, Getting, Image, Insights
Using AgentQL and Pipedream to Fix Missing RSS Feeds / / No Comments Last week I blogged about how I used AgentQL to scrape a web page, this blog to be precise, into pure data. If you don’t remember, AgentQL lets you pass a simple query string that is run against a web page and parsed into data. So for example, I was able to use this query on my home page to get a list of entries in pure data: { blogposts[] { url title date } } The REST API was incredibly easy, and I demonstrated in BoxLang how I could use AgentQL to turn my blog’s home page into a much simpler, smaller, HTML version. This of course begs the question, how else could we transform it? What about creating a RSS feed for a blog that doesn’t have one! Of course, if... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: AgentQL, Feeds, missing, Pipedream, using
GeoGuessr for Photos / / No Comments MapaPhoto In my never-ending quest to find alternatives to GeoGuessr, I want to like MapaPhoto – however, this latest ‘geoguessing’ game has just one too many annoying quirks to satisfy my wanderlust.MapaPhoto’s basic game concept is solid. If you’ve ever played GeoGuessr or any of its many imitators, you’ll be familiar with the idea: identify the location shown in a given image by Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: GeoGuessr, photos
Creating a Calendar with BoxLang / / No Comments Chalk this up to – "Here’s a simple idea for a quick and dirty blog post" that turned into a few hours of my holiday weekend. Not only that, this is probably the first of three or so blog posts so… buck up, buttercup, this is going to be a fun ride. A while ago I had written down (well, typed in, I use Microsoft To Do to record writing ideas) the idea of demonstrating calendar creation with BoxLang, specifically creating a dynamic calendar, with or without events, either entirely server-side, or using a combination of client-side code with BoxLang providing the API. For today’s post, I’m going to focus on (what I had assumed would be) the simplest version... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, calendar, creating