web

April 23, 2024

Migrating my blog from Wordpress.com to Hugo & Cloudflare

Migration

A few months ago, I decided to migrate my personal blog (former location) from Wordpress.com (free plan), where I had hosted it since 2008, to a static website (that you are reading now). The reason was that I noticed the ads really taking over the posts: There used to be a banner ad and ads at the end of the posts. But by accident, I browsed my website without UBlock and I saw there were so many ads in the body of the post. One option would have been to go with the paid Starter plan (currently $5, their cheapest paid offering). Instead, I decided to move to a static website.

October 17, 2008

Tutorial : Text geotagging with OpenCalais

This tutorial will show how to use version 3.1 of the Calais API to identify geographic references in a text and display them on an OpenLayers map. I am going to use the Calais API with JSON output (which is a new feature of version 3.1), so that all the processing can be done easily in JavaScript entirely inside a web browser.

May 17, 2008

Tutorial : Thematic mapping with the Google Maps Flash API

chloropleth

Google has recently released a Flash version of the Google Maps API. The goal is to give developers and designers more freedom in the presentation and graphical effects of their maps. Google is certainly not the first provider of a Flash mapping API (see the Yahoo! Maps AS3 API for example) but as one of the original proponents of Ajax web mapping tools, it marks an interesting change of direction (although the original Google Maps API is probably not going away anytime soon). One interesting aspect of using Flash is also a boost in vector graphics rendering speed, which I am going to demonstrate here, with a tutorial showing how to display a chloropleth map with this new API. Here is a link to the final application. It has to be noted that I am definitely not a Flex/ActionScript guru (just a few evenings of experience) so there are probably better ways of doing things than what I am showing here.