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James Louis Smith

DH Map Methods Description

Today in dodgy bodges, I'd like to introduce the 'tile suck'.

So if you use most conventional automated archiving tools on a website with a leaflet map on it (in this example a Mapbox map for the @PortsPastPres website), you may notice that they only ever capture the map tiles visible on the screen.

Not good enough, I say! So my strategy is this:

1) Get the biggest screen you can find. Biiiiiiig. (zooming out on the browser doesn't seem to quite work)

2) Open up the map with the tileset that you want to hoover up into your WARC record (probably in Chrome because that's what Archiveweb.page works on). Set your Leaflet or whatever map viewer to full screen. Start your crawl.

3) Zoom around at each level of zoom for areas of zoom and focus on your map. I'm using a point cluster map so I focus on the areas where my points are. The big screen means that whenever you hit an undownloaded tile, it'll pull it in.

Jul 11, 2023, 13:50 · · · Web · 1 · 0