RI Food Sites

Spring 2020

Made With: HTML/CSS/JS, Mapbox

When the pandemic hit, all the schools in Rhode Island closed, but because many students depend on school for two meals a day, the state set up food sites around the state. The list of sites was in a lengthy table on their website, which made it hard to see locations near you, so I made a map where people could see locations near them.

The map was shared on social media by local officials and hundreds of people a day ended up using it. This project is one of a few that live on the Classical Chronicle website

What I Learned

The hardest part of this project by far was managing the data. Inputting the initial data took a while but ultimately wasn’t so bad. The hardest part was managing updates. After a day or two of trying to manually check each entry to see what changed, I realized I could copy the HTML of the table, prettify it to remove irregularities, and then use a visual differ to see what changed. This was still far from ideal but I maintained the map for several weeks until it had served its original purpose and the analytics showed that there was no more usage.