Maps | from rscottjones
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Maps

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    Breweries I've visited + FOMO about maps

    I’ve been spending a lot of time this week working on my new Maps plugin for Microblog—which, admittedly, involves playing around with a bunch of location data and maps.

    Last night, for instance, I stayed up well beyond my bedtime downloading my untappd checkins1, rooting out the list of actual breweries2 (which, remarkably, untappd doesn’t export in spite of it being a data field in the app), scrubbing unnecessary data, and converting the resulting data to my plugin’s format so I could display them on a map.

    The product of my late night is this map of the 611 different breweries untappd says I’ve been to:

    Side note: I’m currently working on a 600/6000 untappd quest goal (eg, visiting 600 breweries and trying 6000 unique beers). I’ve already reached the brewery mark, but still need to run across another couple dozen unique beers to complete that half of the goal.

    While the original impetus for adding basic map functionality was to show our travel posts on a map for AdventuresAroundthe.World, an expanded plugin—that I’d apparently need to build myself, errr..I mean use Claude.ai to build for me—would also come in handy displaying progress on Jen’s various quests3. Those quest maps would require supporting multiple maps on a site, and multiple icon styles on each map, something well beyond the rudimentary script I used initially. And hence, the need for this plugin.

    But the more I play with it, the more ways I could see myself using it, well beyond quest progress maps. Finished up a hike? Lemme show all those trail photos on a map. Home from a road trip? Add pins for all the places I went, each linked to its corresponding blog post.

    I already have loads of custom Google My Maps, used primarily to display quest progress or for our various adventure maps. So I also built a little helper app that can extract pins from a My Maps export and reformat the data for my own plugin. I think it’ll be quite helpful for anyone who wants to transition over.

    But my plan for rscottjones.com, where I plan on posting most of my adventures, is to transition it from Wordpress to Kirby CMS. It’s a huge and complex task for me, and one that keeps getting bumped further and further down the list of project priorities.

    So now I’m super excited about Jen’s website, and also this plugin, and…well…I’m having FOMO about it. Which, needless to say, is a bit weird because I’m making the damn thing. It feels odd to be so excited (and even a little proud) about something that I won’t be using on my primary website, the one where most of my future maps will reside.4 I can’t scratch my current itch for posting my own maps, even though I just built a great solution for doing so.

    Anyway, I guess this is a long way of saying that you should expect some maps posts here anyway. Oh, and I guess this also served as an excuse to post my Craft Brewery map too! 😉

    1. Super annoying that downloading your data in raw form, even just as a backup, is a “premium” feature that requires a paid subscription. I join every year or two solely so I can grab my data. ↩︎

    2. Of course, this list isn’t exactly how I’d count breweries. For some time, venues could only claim one venue category, so often a place that brewed beer in house might classify themselves as a restaurant if they also sold food. In the last few years, however, venues can select multiple categories, and now venues often claim categories that don’t seem quite accurate. ↩︎

    3. I really like how her site has been coming together. She’s mostly focused on adding “On This Day” posts for each day of the year as opposed to posting in-the-moment posts while we travel, but that’ll come with time. ↩︎

    4. Of course, I’ll build something very similar over there, but…that’s at some unknown point in the website, and well, I’m excited now. ↩︎

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    Airports I've Flown Thru

    This is primarily a test of a conversion tool I’m working on in conjunction with the Maps plugin I’m releasing soon. The goal here is to provide a way to easily migrate from Google My Maps to my Maps for Micro.blog plugin.

    I don’t think the map itself will carry over to any social feeds, so you’ll need to click through to see anything.