A new contact page replaces the old contact, FAQ, link submission and review guidelines pages. Simpler and less repetitive. And instead of a contact form, there’s just an email address. So much spam was coming through the contact forms that all form results got sent to the spam folder: I’ve been missing legitimate messages. So we’ll try this instead.
Category: Housekeeping
Upcoming Changes to the Email Digest
My hosting provider has announced that it will be retiring the announcement list feature on which The Map Room relies for its weekly email digest. Which means that at some point in the near future it will need to find a new home.
The best option, from a features and privacy standpoint, is probably Buttondown (which I already use for my personal newsletter). But adding The Map Room and its subscribers to my account will move me up the paid plan ladder, so this switch will cost me a bit (insert subtle reminder here that the Patreon exists). I don’t begrudge doing so: my email subscribers are an active and significant part of my audience (to the point where I sometimes wonder whether I should go email-first) so it’s worth doing that aspect of The Map Room properly. And I’ve been eyeing a move to Buttondown in any event; my hosting provider is just making it happen sooner rather than later.
Because email subscribers have properly opted in to the existing service, I can move subscriptions over seamlessly when the time comes. I’ll try to give a heads-up before that happens, though.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost
Today is The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. It’s also the final day of its membership drive, which as of the time of this writing is just three members short of the goal.
To mark those occasions, I’ve written something as an exclusive for those members: The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost, an essay about the origins of my rather personal relationship with maps.
Looking back, it seems clear that I have always had an obsession with knowing exactly where I was, at all times. No trip would be undertaken without having a map of the destination, even when I was a child. Every time I’d go to a summer camp, I’d have made a map of the grounds by the time I was done. And even into adulthood, not having a map of where I was made me very, very uncomfortable.
Also features dragons. Again, you’ll need to be a paid member to read the essay. And if we reach the target, paid members will also get access to my presentation on fantasy map design.
Final Weekend for the Membership Drive
The Map Room’s membership drive is entering its final weekend, and while we’re getting awfully close to the goal of 22 paid members by the end of the month (i.e., Monday), we’re not quite there yet. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time to push it over the top.
For some context on why I’m running a membership drive, I’ve posted an essay to the Patreon on the economics of blogging: how the golden age of ad-supported blogging came to an end, the challenge of doing what I’m doing in the current blogging landscape, and the state of the map blogosphere.
The Map Books of 2025 page is now live. It will be updated throughout the year as new information comes in. Contact me with corrections or new books to add to the list.
Membership Drive
19 / 22
We interrupt The Map Room for a pledge break.
As you may know, I’ve wanted The Map Room to go ad-free for some time. But much as I’d like to get rid of them, Google ads represent something like 60 percent of my website revenue. I launched a Patreon page last year, and I’m deeply gratified by the support I’ve received from my subscribers, but to replace my ad revenue I need there to be more of you.
So I’m launching a campaign this month. Here’s what’s happening:
I’m deactivating Google ads for the entire month of March. If enough new people join my Patreon as paid members by the end of the month, the ads will stay off for good. The goal is to reach a total of 22 paid members by March 31—The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. That number would represent roughly what I’ve been making, on average, from Google ads in recent years—an admittedly modest amount, but it would enable me to walk away from the ad ecosystem completely and still pay the bills.
Continue reading “Membership Drive”Updated the blogroll. It’s a lot smaller than it used to be. Who am I missing?
A Social Media Update
The Map Room’s Twitter account was finally deactivated on Wednesday after roughly two years of sitting idle. If the @maproomblog username is resurrected and reused, it ain’t me.
Follow The Map Room on Bluesky or Mastodon instead. Cross-posting to the Facebook page continues, though given how Meta is it’s unlikely you’ll see things there.
The Map Room now has, for some reason, a Bluesky account. I haven’t seen much in the way of cartographic activity on that platform, but maybe the massive onslaught of followers that will inevitably result from this post will change that.
Site Updates and Upgrades
More than two dozen book listings have just been added to the Map Books of 2024 page. I’ve also been making some long overdue tweaks to the design and functionality of the site, including switching to WordPress’s Gutenberg editor at long last (which has, unsurprisingly, involved some glitches and hiccups). Also, the Tumblr mirror has been retired; see the Subscribe and Follow page for other ways to receive new updates.
Help The Map Room Go Ad-Free
Earlier this year my ad revenue increased nearly tenfold. This obviously led me to conclude that it’s probably time to stop relying on ad revenue, and try moving to a model based on reader support. If you’d like to understand how I came to that contradictory conclusion, read on; otherwise the tl;dr is that you can now support The Map Room via monthly payments at both Ko-fi and Patreon. When monthly payments reach a certain level (see below), I will discontinue ads on this site.
Continue reading “Help The Map Room Go Ad-Free”The Map Books of 2024 page is now live; I managed to get an early start on it this year. There aren’t many books listed so far, because it’s early, and books in this category typically get published in the second half of the year. But you can help me fill in the blanks. If you know about a book coming out some time this year that’s on a map-related subject, please let me know. Ideally, the book is in the publisher’s catalogue and has at least a tentative publication date, but I’ll work with what I can get; I basically just need something to link to.
Updated the Map Books of 2023 page last week with some titles I hadn’t previously known about. I try to make this list as comprehensive as possible, so if I’ve missed something, let me know.
The Map Books of 2023 page is finally live. I typically have it up closer to the start of the year, but this hasn’t been a typical year, so it’s taken a while to get to. As always, please let me know if you know of a book that came out or is coming out this year—anything to do with cartography, maps or a related subject—that ought to be listed on this page; I’ll need a publication date and something to link to.
Twenty Years
Today is The Map Room’s 20th anniversary.
The rule of thumb is that an item is vintage if it’s more than 40 years old, and antique if it’s more than 100 years old. (That tan-coloured Replogle globe with South Sudan on it? Not antique.) Time runs faster on the web, though: something 20 years old feels geologically ancient. Running a 20-year-old blog in 2023 feels like keeping a pet coelacanth: you’re keeping a living fossil alive.
As social media approaches what may well be its extinction event, there’s been a lot of talk about “bringing back blogs.” Um, blogs never went away: Kottke.org just marked its 25th anniversary, and there are still plenty of websites out there powered by WordPress or something similar that don’t call themselves blogs. What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger. Lots of people started blogs in the format’s early years but didn’t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua blog to be a blogger nowadays. But institutions still post updates in blog form, and experts share their insights on platforms that blur the lines between blog, social media and newsletter.
(Certainly the map blog never went away: we still have general-interest blogs like Maps Mania and Lat × Long; industry and academic figures like Matthew Edney, Kenneth Field and James Killick regularly post commentary and links; and plenty of working cartographers share their latest creations on blogging platforms as well.1)
The Map Room is not an institution, nor am I an expert. No really: I’m not. The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject—“an exercise in self-education” is what I called it—was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now.2 I am also, twenty years on, rather more self-educated: I understand what I’m linking to more than I used to, and I’ve seen enough to know when to be skeptical. I’ve called bullshit on more than one occasion. I still can’t make a map of my own (there’s an alternate universe in which I’m making a perfectly happy living as a freelance cartographer), but my appreciation for them is all the richer for having spent two decades at this.