Yesterday, we were talking about extending the current infrastructure database to incorporate other information to provide prompts to return machines to the pool of resources after they have completed their current role/loan, etc. There is also a wider requirement to bring these services back to Cambridge from Equinix/Scaleway, which will be the subject of a follow-up post. However, the idea of extending the database made me think that it would be amusing to overlay the machine’s positions onto Google Maps.
I added positioning data in the Jekyll Collection _machines\*.md for each machine. e.g. ainia.md
---
name: ainia
...
latitude: 52.2109
longitude: 0.0917
---
Then Jekyll’s Liquid templating engine can create a JavaScript array for us
// Define machines data array from Jekyll collection
const machinesData = [
{% for machine in site.machines %}
{% if machine.latitude and machine.longitude %}
{
name: "{{ machine.name }}",
lat: {{ machine.latitude }},
lng: {{ machine.longitude }},
{% if machine.description %}
description: "{{ machine.description | escape }}",
{% endif %}
// Add any other properties you need
},
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
];
This array can be converted into an array of map markers. Google have an API for clustering the markers into a count of machines. I added a random offset to each location to avoid all the markers piling up on a single spot.
The interactive map can be seen at machines.html