GeoJSON rendering improvements

Nearly two weeks ago, we announced support for rendering geographic data. Today, we’re excited to roll out several improvements:

• GitHub now supports rendering TopoJSON, an extension of GeoJSON that encodes topology and can be up to 80% smaller than its GeoJSON equivalent.
• Starting today, you don’t have to rename geo files with a new extension. GitHub will now render GeoJSON (and TopoJSON) in all .geojson, .topojson, and .json files.
• Complex geographic datasets can often be difficult to visualize, especially if points are grouped close together. We now automatically cluster nearby markers, allowing us to better support larger datasets.

Embed Support

Want to make your geoJSON map available someplace other than GitHub? Simply modify this template, and place it in any HTML page that supports javascript, such as GitHub Pages, and you’ll have a beautiful, portable map:

<script src="https://embed.github.com/view/geojson/<username>/<repo>/<ref>/<path_to_file>"></script>

For more information, including how to customize the embed code, see the help article Mapping geoJSON files on GitHub. Of course, you can always embed STL files as well.

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.