MapBox: open-source rival to Google Maps

Inspiration
By published

We get under the hood of MapBox, a rival service to Google Maps that uses open source map data, to find out how it's put together.

MapBox is a fantastic site for designing and publishing maps. It offers different tools for styling and deploying them as well as providing services for hosting them. Many of these tools utlise OpenStreetMap - a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world that's free to download and use.

The way MapBox is built is somewhat unusual. Developer Young Hahn of Development Seed explains it’s powered by something of an anti-CMS, Jekyll, and GitHub pages. "Jekyll is a simple and subtly powerful way to make websites," he says. "Jekyll is a converter, not a server. It runs any time you want to update your site but doesn’t need to be running for your website to be live.

"We aren’t sure yet when Jekyll is the right tool for the job but we are sure of this: we’re excited about Jekyll and the concept of converters rather than servers," he continues. "Jekyll has made our website easy to work with (everyone on our team knows HTML and markdown, and working with YAML is a breeze), extremely fast (it’s hard to beat the speed of serving static files), and worry-free: there are no entry points to hack and there is no live web app to go down."

This showcase was originally published in .net magazine issue 234.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of art and design enthusiasts, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson, Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The ImagineFX magazine team also pitch in, ensuring that content from leading digital art publication ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.