Juan Convers

One of the constant topics in the news are the mass shootings in the United States and the debates related to gun control, the 2nd amendment of their constitution and the almost impossible effort to regulate this market. This is particularly true now that they have presidential elections at the end of this year.

So how does it look the gun ownership in this country compared to the rest of the world (gun ownership per 100 habitants):

I guessed the USA had the highest gun ownership rate and that turned out to be true, but I never realised how high it was. It seems crazy to me that a country has more firearms than habitants!. The Washington Post has an interesting article where they discuss this issue.

The central office of statistics in Ireland website cso.ie has some interesting data tables that can downloaded, so yesterday I decided to pull out the unemployment data and plot it.

I was curious because when I arrived to the country the economy was doing really good, but I saw the changes during the crisis of 08. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened in the last years. Even if the unemployment level hasn't reached yet the numbers of 2005, I think the trend is definitively positive.

In this new year one my resolutions was to to undust my social accounts and to update them on a regular basis.

I also thought it would be interesting to use my personal website to keep a blog with the most interesting updates I post on those social profiles or to write about anything that comes to my mind. Nevertheless I didn't want to spend a lot of time setting up yet another blog using wordpress or something similar. It was an interesting experience when I did it for my career break but this time around I wanted a simpler solution.

Based on my recent experience writing back and forth to Google Spreadsheets I decided to use this product as super simple CMS. Through this approach I can write the posts on the columns and rows interface and include the html tags I need such as this bold or this italic and add links to the different media elements that I might want to include in the posts

Once I'm happy with any particular post, I can export those contents as a JSON file that I can parse and display on the existing application. On the image at the right you can see how my CMS looks like :). I basically used the request node module to get the JSON string and then parse it on my application:

What I like about this approach is that I can iterate over the JSON object returned by the Google Spreadsheets and get each one of the values I'm interested in and then I can push them to my local JSON object.

When I'm rendering the data on the frontend side I can access those fields quite easily. I will probably later on write a detailed post on how the process works but I'm happy with the results for now.

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