David Shorthouse, perhaps best know for his fabulous Bionomia project is also the author of SimpleMappr , a web site for generating publication-ready species distribution maps. These maps have appeared in many publications, and also pop up in iNaturalist.
David has announced that SimpleMappr will be turned off. Obviously not an easy decision for him to take, and sadly yet more evidence of the fragility of a lot of taxonomic infrastructure (as seen in the struggles of both BHL and TAXACOM).
I don’t use SimpleMappr, but I know that lots of people do, and so I wondered how easy it would be to create a new version (based on David’s code) that could be hosted either on a central site or on people’s own computers The short answer is that it is “easy”, so long as your definition of “easy” includes (a) getting Claude Code to do the bulk of the work, and (b) ignoring most of the more sophisticated features of David’s app.
Long story short, I have a (somewhat) working version of SimpleMappr running on a cloud server at https://simplemappr.cloud, source code here.
As with my previous post, this project involved forking the original code, asking Claude to read it, and sketch out a way to move it to a more robust setting, in this case using Docker containers. Early days, but I am delighted how easy (for various values of “easy”) it is to breath new life into old projects.
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