A Curious Animal

WordPress is awesome, an incredible project with thousands of plugins that does not need any presentation. What start as a blogging platform has become a powerful framework to build almost anything.

Jekyll is an open source static site generator. It allows writing content in markdown (also HTML) using some rules, like adding some front matter on pages or posts. Later jekyll compiles all the code and generates an static version for each page and post.

If you have never saw maps hosted in Mapbox platform you would probably agree on the quality of its designs. The business of Mapbox is to host and server geospatial data. For this reason, all the great tools Mapbox facilitates are oriented to help their users to prepare and work with their data.

I have used regularly SublimeText (v2) for the past year. I used it mainly to programming in JavaScript, HTML, CSS and to write in Markdown syntax (I’m sorry but to programming in Java NetBeans continues to be my preferred IDE).

Recently I started an application using NodeJS with ExpressJS framework and decided to use passport for authenticate the users. As many other times I wanted to use flash messages so, when user authentication fails, the application shows a message informing about bad credentials. Nothing new on the horizon until…. OMG !!! I can’t see the flash messages !!!

Main reason for this post is trying don’t repeat yourself (DRY) because, often, I fall in the recursive need to read and write compressed and not compressed files (mainly JSON and CSV).

OpenLayers3 offers the ol.source.GeoJSON class that allows to read data from a GeoJSON source (an URL, a JavaScript object or a text string).

A heatmap is a powerful way to visualise data. Given a matrix of data each value is represented by a color. The implementation of the heatmap algorithm is expensive in computation terms: for each grid’s pixel you need to compute its colour from a set of known values. As you can thing, it is not feasible to be implement it on the client side because map rendering would be really slow.

It was a long road but finally it comes true: The Book of OpenLayers 3 is finished.

From my short experience, let me summarize some things you must take into account when writing a book. Its is not a mechanical process, it is more related with inspiration, but we must be constant and productive.