KnowWhere

A few people have asked how the scoring works, and one or two have asked, a bit pointedly, why their pin 40 km from Lagos only got half marks. Here’s the longer version of the info box: how to play, how the points add up, and where it all comes from. The basics Every day you get 5 cities. For each one you drop a pin on a map with no labels: no names, no roads, just coastlines, borders, rivers and lakes. Then you answer 3 multiple-choice questions about the city. Pin first, then questions. It’s…

During a bit of football banter about League 1 over the weekend, Ken said to me “I bet you’ve never been to any of those places either. All a bit far north” – it turned out I had visited 18/24 of the places in the League. That prompted an idea for a geography quiz, could I make a quiz that combined pinning the locations of cities on a map with some general knowledge questions about those cities? I started out with this prompt: I want to make a geography quiz about cities in the world. For each…

We see loads in the news about oil prices, the potential shortages caused by wars involving Iran and Russia and whether the UK should licence further oil extraction from existing oil fields in the North Sea. I wondered whether there was a mappy project opportunity around oil production and consumption. I started out with this prompt: “I want to make a map based dashboard about oil production, consumption, refining and the flows between countries. before we start can you research what data is…

Thanks to Zachary DeBottis what3words’ 2025 accounts I am fascinated by what3words, it defies the laws of finance that apply to most businesses and shows how little my old fashioned understanding of business models is relevant in the modern tech economy. The idea of a verbal description of a 3m square as a proxy for coordinates might have sounded like a good idea a decade ago but adoption seems to have been slow and new technology may be about to overtake the idea. The 2025 accounts just landed…

After I had finished categorising all the posts on Mappery (see this post) it occurred to me that a similar strategy might be used for geocoding ungeocoded posts. If you have been following my vibe coding posts you will know that Arnaud and I built a geocoding and mapping plugin for our WordPress site that we are about to publish. When we built the plugin, I salvaged the geocodes from the old plugin that we had disabled but that left nearly 1,000 posts ungeocoded (either posts from before the…

On the Mappery site we have almost 2,400 posts on WordPress and we had never used the Category feature to sort them when we were adding posts. When we built the new Mappery Map Plugin for WordPress we included the option to only map posts in a specific category which we thought would be useful to some users in the future.Yesterday afternoon I wanted to see if there was a smart way to categorise 2,400 posts without stepping through each one in the WordPress edit interface which would have…

Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects. The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise, the way I made them was interesting, so i thought I would post about it. I started out by building an empty slide deck on Google Slides, each slide had a title and a few had a handful of words, they all…

When Ed challenged me to make a map of Geomob Events on a podcast, I jumped in scraped the data and produced quite a nice map despite fighting a battle with Gemini to extract the data for the map from the markdown files of the Geomob website. The problem, as Ed pointed out retrospectively was that the events map was going to be difficult to maintain as further events got scheduled, it was very much a snapshot at a point in time and my suggestion that someone could edit the json file of events…

I recently posted about the build of my “A Pint Near Me” app. When I had finished the build I asked Claude “Can you give me a few interesting stats from the pubs data?” The most 5 common names? How many single name pubs (ie not repeated)? Any regional patterns in naming? Anything else? Pause for a minute and see if you can guess the answers, maybe have a play with the map to test your guesses before you scroll down. Answers These answers were all generated by Claude based on the prompt above.…

A while after I blogged about my Pub Density Map it got picked up by Hacker News and the map got a big spike in views. Some of the comments were complaints that a pub was missing or that the pubs data was not searchable, some were less helpful. I had used the Open Pubs data from GetTheData, which in hindsight, was maybe not the best choice, the data was quite rough and a bit out of date but it seemed fit for my purpose of illustrating the areas of the country with highest pub density (pubs per…

A lot of the posts that we share on Mappery come via our social feeds at Mastodon and Bluesky as either an @ message or a hashtag #MapsintheWild. Up till now our workflow to turn the social posts into blog posts on Mappery was something like this: Check the note that we keep of where we finished in our last posting session Search the social platform for the next @ or # Download the image in the social post Copy the text of the post if it is relevant to quote Start a new post in our WordPress…

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project. I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map down, which I promptly did. This was a big disappointment as I was just about to expand the map to almost 400 species and now I had no data. Learning – even if data is apparently free and open, carefully…

I have been using Claude to help me build maps for a few months now and I have been very happy with the results which I think have been improving. I keep hearing about Claude Code and wondered what is the difference? The answer: a heck of a lot! Using Claude Chat (or any of the other chatbots) you can prompt the AI to write files for you, to write scripts and guide you in running them. That’s how I have been working up till now. Once you have given Claude Code the permissions to access your…

Maps in the Wild Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on clothes, furniture, alcohol etc). For several years we had a map plugin that allowed us to enter a coordinate pair for a post and to render a clustered map with pins representing each post, click on a…

After I published my map of defence spending a friend suggested that it would be interesting to see how things had changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990/91. I knew that the data I had covered a longer time period so I asked Claude if we could update the map and it checked the data and confirmed that there was reasonable data coverage back to the mid 70’s so I decided to backdate (or is it update?) the map to run from 1975 to 2024. What’s new The extended map now runs from 1975 to 2024,…

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map…

Thanks to Mario Ame Everything was working fine. I had just finished building the Grow Your Own allotments map, deployed it to the live server, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. A few days later a friend messaged me that the map had stopped working. No regions, just a blank basemap. Checked the console and got this: “Server returned no content-length header or content-length exceeding request. Check that your storage backend supports HTTP Byte Serving.” Not the most helpful error…

The current outbreak of Ebola has inevitably encouraged lots of maps of the outbreak, just search for “Maps of the Ebola outbreak in Africa” and you will find something like this. Some of these are pretty good, some don’t communicate very well and a few are awful. My attention was drawn to a static map obviously generated by AI which was so so bad that it was laughable and you had to wonder why anyone share this without picking up the numerous obvious geographic errors, I wwonderedhat Claude…

I am struggling to come up with an idea for what to map next. A bit of a brain freeze. Have you got an idea? Leave a suggestion in the comments.

This morning there was a lot of amused banter amongst my geo-pals about the UK Government’s Fuel Finder API based on an article in The Times (possible paywall) on the problems with the data. You can download the data or access the api from the gov.uk site. I downloaded the data for this morning (31st […]

I was looking for a simpler project to build after my last couple which had proved more complicated than I had anticipated. I came up with the idea of mapping airports and finding some data on their environmental impact – good idea, but not so easy. Finding a dataset of airports was relatively easy, the […]