Yesterday I was reading the news about Apple. On Tuesday, they reported the financial results of their fiscal first quarter. One conclusion from this event is that even with record profits, iPhone sales rose by less than 1 percent from a year earlier.

I was checking the Mobile & Tablet operating systems market share data published by netmarketshare.net and this downward trend is clear:

I never owned an iPhone. I really like the quality of the hardware and software produced by this company (In fact, I'm writing this post on a MacBook Air), but I don't like the closed, restricted ecosystem associated with their business model. It's refreshing to see so many different Android devices on the market.

One of the constant topics in the news is the mass shootings in the United States and the debates related to gun control, the 2nd Amendment of its constitution, and the almost impossible effort to regulate this market. This is particularly true now that they have presidential elections at the end of the year.

So how does gun ownership in this country compare to the rest of the world (gun ownership per 100 inhabitants):

I guessed the USA had the highest gun ownership rate and that turned out to be true, but I never realized how high it was. It seems crazy to me that a country has more firearms than inhabitants! The Washington Post has an interesting article where they discuss this issue.

The Central Office of Statistics in Ireland’s website cso.ie has some interesting data tables that can be downloaded, so yesterday I decided to pull out the unemployment data and plot it.

I was curious because when I arrived in the country, the economy was doing really well, but I saw changes during the 2008 crisis. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened in the last few years. Even if the unemployment level hasn't yet reached the levels of 2005, I think the trend is definitely positive.

In this new year, one of my resolutions was to dust off my social accounts and update them regularly.

I also thought it would be interesting to use my personal website to keep a blog with the most noteworthy updates from those social profiles, or to write about anything that comes to mind. However, I didn't want to spend a lot of time setting up yet another blog using WordPress or something similar. It was an interesting experience when I did it for my career break, but this time around I wanted a simpler solution.

Based on my recent experience writing back and forth to Google Spreadsheets, I decided to use it as a super simple CMS. Through this approach, I can write posts directly in the spreadsheet interface and include the HTML tags I need, such as this bold or this italic, as well as links to various media elements I might want to include in the posts.

Once I'm happy with a particular post, I can export its contents as a JSON file, which I then parse and display in my application. In the image on the right, you can see how my CMS looks :). I essentially used the request Node module to get the JSON string and then parse it within my application:

What I like about this approach is that I can iterate over the JSON object returned by Google Spreadsheets and extract each value I’m interested in, then push them to my local JSON object.

When I render the data on the frontend, I can access those fields quite easily. I’ll probably write a detailed post later on about how the process works, but for now, I’m happy with the results.

Note: When I wrote this original post, I was using Google Spreadsheets. Nowadays, I’ve completely switched to a Markdown-only approach.

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