Last week I helped the fine folks over at MassLive put together a map of all the fireworks displays in the Pioneer Valley on and around July 4.
I compiled all the data and threw it on a spreadsheet with some very basic HTML, and then, from my understanding, MassLive put it through a magic Internet machine and, hey presto, it’s a fireworks map.
This is what it looked like before:
And here’s the after:
Send this through a series of tubes.
This is one of my favorite tricks. It essentially makes Google Spreadsheets into the roughest content manager system ever.
What’s going on here: information is entered into the spreadsheet, the speadsheet is then published automatically as a .json file, which is interpreted by javascript and overlaid on a map all on page load. There are other, better ways to do this, but they require php and interpreted languages interacting with the Google API, and those methods aren’t available on the MassLive servers (which are tuned for heavy load and raw HTML serving more than nimble execution of dynamic languages).
So hideously convoluted javascript it is.
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