Here’s a news roundup from the Munibot front, everybody’s favourite Twitter geo bots.
About a month ago @munibot_cat, the smallest of the current bots, finished its journey across the 948 Catalan municipalities. It took just under a year and along the way it gathered a small but loyal group of followers. Its bigger brother @munibot_es carries on, having just surpassed a quarter of all municipalities visited.
Well done, @munibot_cat
While one bot finished its journey, another one just started. From sea to shining sea, @countybot_us will visit all 3221 US counties and equivalents. I wasn’t sure how the larger units than European municipalities would work but I’m really enjoying the images generated.
The mid-western counties, drawn like a grid of rectangles, look like artworks that can be hung on the wall.
The imagery comes from the USGS National Map. The WFS and WMS services powered by ArcGIS are mostly ok, except for one important aspect in our case. The WMS service lies if you pass a FORMAT=image/geotiff parameter and returns a plain old TIFF, without embedded georeference information. That meant that I had to georeference the image myself before passing it to the processing functions that create the mask effect, which meant dusting off the venerable Python GDAL bindings. True to their reputation, they were a bit of a pain to install and set up but we got there.
The Munibot Map Apps finally got a search box so users can jump straight to their favourite administrative unit and check if a tweet exists or not. It was great fun to build the underlying API with FastAPI, its documentation is truly exceptional. I played around a bit with the async support but it turned out that the synchronous versions of the calls were slightly faster! So definitely not worth the overhead.
I also used this as an excuse to learn a bit about Traefik, specially its automatic SSL certificate renewal setup. I wish my past self from a decade ago could see these tools! Having said that, all the munibot database infrastructure is still proudly powered by SQLite so there’s definitely value in old boring pieces of software.