Aadarsha Gopala Reddy

Aadarsha Gopala Reddy

M.Sc. Computer Science graduate from Washington University in St. Louis

Talk Map Tooling

Talk Map Tooling

This repository includes a small toolchain to generate an interactive Leaflet map showing locations of your talks based on the front matter in _talks/*.md.

What it does

  • Scrapes the location: field from each Markdown file in _talks/.
  • Geocodes locations using Nominatim via geopy.
  • Uses getorg to produce a clustered Leaflet map.
  • Writes the data and page assets into talkmap/ so the site can serve the map statically.

Outputs (committed to the repo):

  • talkmap/org-locations.js
  • talkmap/map.html
  • talkmap/leaflet_dist/ (Leaflet assets)

Prerequisites

  • Windows with Python 3 installed (recommended: Python 3.8+)
  • Optional: a virtual environment
  • Python packages: geopy, getorg, requests, pyyaml, jinja2

Install deps (PowerShell):

# from the repo root
py -3 -m venv .venv    # optional but recommended
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
pip install geopy getorg requests pyyaml jinja2

Generate or update the map

  1. Ensure your talks are in _talks/ with front matter including a location: string.
  2. Run the generator from inside _talks/ so relative paths line up (as expected by the script):
Set-Location _talks
python ..\talkmap.py
Set-Location ..

This will (re)create the following:

  • talkmap\org-locations.js with geocoded coordinates
  • talkmap\map.html to view the map standalone
  • talkmap\leaflet_dist assets (if missing)
  1. Commit the updated files so they are served by GitHub Pages:
git add talkmap\org-locations.js talkmap\map.html talkmap\leaflet_dist

Viewing locally

You can open talkmap\map.html directly in a browser, or serve the Jekyll site and link to it:

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml

Notes and troubleshooting

  • Geocoding is rate-limited. If you have many talks, run the script sparingly and avoid rapid retries.
  • If a location isn’t found, try making it more specific (e.g., “City, State, Country”).
  • The map assets are static; no runtime API keys are required.
  • Licensing: Leaflet and related assets are under their respective licenses included in talkmap/leaflet_dist. See the main repository LICENSE for the site content license, and Minimal Mistakes/academicpages MIT license.

Updating dependencies

These Python tools are not part of the GitHub Pages build. If you change this tooling or add notebooks (e.g., talkmap.ipynb), commit only the outputs in talkmap/ so the site remains fully static in production.