July 2, 2022

<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing: A “Dry Run”

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I’m a big fan of maps. One of my favorite ways to procrastinate is by opening up Google Maps and messing around, looking at things. Some of my most frequented websites are basically just maps with layers: windy.com, darksitefinder.com, gaiagps.com…

One thing I’ve never done is make my own layered maps, à la Google Maps’s “My Maps” feature. Google has never been what I wanted for this—it’s hard to use, it doesn’t look good, and the embed feature is slow and buggy. To be honest, these shortcomings meant I never thought about what I would do with my own layered maps, so I never had much interest in them.

Fair warning, now’s the point where this is going to start sounding like an infomercial.

Today, while planning on writing one of these posts that could use a map for support, I asked myself the question “Should I just make a map for this?” and remembered a startup I heard about a few weeks ago called Felt.

Felt is a webapp where you can build maps. You can add pins and draw on them and add layers of data from standard political boundaries up to locations of squirrels in Central Park.

It was exactly what I was looking for to create a map of the most recent GaWC Cities Classification for a post I’m going to write. I’m not sure there’s an easier tool out there to do what I needed to do.

I started out playing with the features and started to drop some pins. They look so much better than Google Maps’s custom stuff.

I was manually adding individual pins, until I realized I could probably just do this with software and upload it. I turned to Google Sheets, found a plugin that could pull coordinates of names by Cities, and voila.

Once they add some other features, mostly around Layers and automation, this tool will be insanely cool. I want to split up all the points I added into individual layers, so I can toggle on and off points to see only “Alpha” cities, for example. Plus they have some cool layers today, but I want to see thousands more (I imagine there will be layer-publishing tools eventually and the community will add them in huge numbers. I’d publish this GaWC Layer if I could!). The big feature that I want is a Zapier hookup, so I can build a stack of automations when I visit a place, or be able to be notified as layers and maps update. Could be cool!

I could also see their “Upload” feature doing a bit more. I had to build this geojson file, but it’ll be much more accessible when they have their own way to interact with the data itself in here, and I could have just made a list of cities and chosen colors directly in Felt, instead of having to put it together from a bunch of different data sources.

There will be a bit more on this tomorrow as I talk about those GaWC cities. My new map will be embedded in that post, but here’s the public link. Go nuts!

For now, I’m just excited to add another Map website into my procrastination routine. Can’t wait to see what I can do with it.

<aside> 🐦 If you liked this, please leave a comment or give me a follow on Twitter!

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