Hus Dagsins
My first web application
My first web application — an interactive Leaflet map of historical Akureyri houses from Arnor Bliki Hallmundsson's newspaper column. Data scraping, geocoding, and deployment learned from scratch.
The Challenge
Arnor Bliki Hallmundsson has spent over a decade writing about the historical houses of Akureyri — nearly 700 articles documenting the town's architectural heritage. But the articles existed only as text, scattered across blog posts and newspaper columns. There was no way to see the geographic pattern, explore the houses on a map, or understand how the documented buildings relate to each other across the town. I wanted to make that visible — and I wanted to learn how to build for the web.
The Approach
Scraped article data from Arnor Bliki's published columns, geocoded each house location, and built an interactive Leaflet map with searchable pins, smooth zooming, and direct links back to the original articles. Version 2.0 added marker clustering for dense urban areas, a mobile-optimized layout, and a statistics dashboard. The whole project runs on GitHub Pages — no server, no database, just a static site with embedded data.
Outcomes
This is where it started. Hus Dagsins is my first web application — an interactive map that brings Arnor Bliki Hallmundsson's decade-long documentation of Akureyri's historical houses into a single, explorable interface.
Arnor Bliki is a teacher at Verkmenntaskolinn in Akureyri and a dedicated local historian. Over eleven years, he has written nearly 700 articles about the town's houses — their stories, their builders, their place in Akureyri's history. His work is published on akureyri.net and his personal blog, and he has authored the book Oddeyri. I wanted to give his work a spatial dimension — to let people see the houses on a map, not just read about them.
The Build
The project taught me the entire workflow from data to deployment. I scraped article data from published columns, geocoded each house address to latitude/longitude coordinates, built a responsive map interface with Leaflet, and deployed on GitHub Pages. Three months from zero to a working public application.
Version 2.0 added marker clustering for the dense downtown area, a mobile-optimized layout, and a small statistics dashboard. Each pin links directly to the original article, so the map serves as both a geographic index and a gateway to Arnor Bliki's writing.
Why It Matters
Every project after this one — Arctic Tracker, Gjöll, BORG, smarason.is — traces back to what I learned here: that building for the web is within reach, that real data makes better projects than tutorial exercises, and that the best motivation is making something useful for someone whose work you respect.
Technology Stack
People
Lessons Learned
- The best first project is one you actually care about. Mapping a friend's life work made every technical hurdle worth solving.
- Static hosting on GitHub Pages is underrated — no server, no cost, no maintenance. For a data visualization project, it is more than enough.
- Data scraping teaches you more about web architecture than any tutorial. Understanding how content is structured on the web is foundational to building for it.
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