Thursday, June 23, 2022

The Drunken Spider Crawl

Today I finally got around to creating my own 'data spider' map, inspired by William Davis's viral Hub and Spoke interactive map.

My Drunken Spider Map can help you find the ten nearest bars to any location in London or New York. If you pan around the map then the 'spider' will walk around the map, so that it is always pointing to the ten nearest bars to the center of the map.

Cloning William's map was very easy. Essentially all it involved was adding my own data and Mapbox account code. I also added a geolocate button. So, if you live in London or New York you can simply press this button to automatically find the ten nearest bars to your current location.

My Drunken Spider Map is hosted on Glitch, which means you can easily clone the map simply by pressing the 'Remix' button on its Glitch page. If you want to create a Drunken Spider Map for your town or city then you can use overpass turbo to quickly get the data for all the local bars.

If you want bar data for a different city then you can use this overpass turbo query. Simply center overpass turbo on a city, press the 'run' button' and then press 'export' and save the data as a geojson file. Then add the data to your Glitch clone of my Drunken Spider Map.

Of course you could always use overpass turbo to download other data. For example this query will give you the locations of all the cafes in the current map view on overpass turbo. Of course if you do use cafe data then you should change the name of your project from the Drunken Spider Map to the Caffinated Spider Map.

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