site/maps

A brief note before heading off to teach Network City.

First, even though I haven't written much on any site in the last
few days, I've been busy working on migrating my own sites to a new server and on getting the networked publics site updated to drupal 4.7.4 so that it can host our upcoming book. A lot broke in these transitions, from trouble with user privileges (ill-thought out on the part of my host) to "collation issues" (this time the trouble is with Drupal). You may notice some stray strange characters throughout this site as a result, but I'm cleaning those up little by little. My hope is that now that I've dealt with it this kind of thing won't be a problem in the future. But it reminds me how fragile Drupal is as a content management system and how, more than a decade after the web first entered my life, how far away we are from an inexpensive (or free!) application that can just manage content efficiently and effortlessly. While I can configure the site and leave it to someone, when that site requires upgrades or if it ever has to migrate servers I have to get back in the picture or the client has to find someone willing to take on the project.

Second, in an unrelated note, worldmapper is a great site, containing hundreds of projections of the world such as this one:

world population

which shows "the earnings of the richest tenth of the population living there, as a proportion of the earnings of the richest tenth living in all territories"

vs this one:

flights

which shows "the proportion of all kilometres flown around the world by aircraft that were registered there."

 

Read more