National Park Dorling Cartogram

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with data visu­al­iza­tion and learn­ing how to use the Pro­to­vis JavaScript library. Here is an exam­ple that I have been work­ing on of a Dor­ling Car­togram. This Dor­ling Car­togram encodes the size of the national parks as the size of the cir­cle; and the per­cent­age of atten­dance as the circle’s color. The National Park data comes from The National Park Ser­vice Pub­lic Use Sta­tis­tics Reports. It is based on the Dor­ling Car­togram exam­ple from the Pro­to­vis exam­ples. The cir­cles are roughly posi­tioned based on the National Park’s geo­graphic loca­tion. The atten­dance fig­ures come from 2009, I hope to update the map once the data for 2010 is complete.


See the exam­ple here: National Park Dor­ling Car­togram
You can get the source code on github.


Using YUI Get Module for cross-domain JSON

Intro The Get Util­ity is one of the smaller YUI mod­ules. Despite its size, how and when to use it can be quite com­pli­cated. It is used with css and javascript files to pro­vide pro­gres­sive load­ing of func­tion­al­ity and cross-site data retrieval. Pro­gres­sive load­ing is a tech­nique to load resources as they are needed on


New Garden Photos

The gar­den is look­ing great, I har­vested the first pota­toes this week. It looks like the squash are just a cou­ple weeks away. A pretty lit­tle lady bug