Gary Gale

When I first made the Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.

But two years is a long time in geo-technology and the original map just feels ... tired. So I decided it was time for a face lift and while I was at it, to incorporate the Italian version of the map that Simone Cortesi forked from the original one. Apparently places can be rude in languages besides (British) English.

So I reforked Simone's Italian version and updated the Rude Places map based on Bryan McBride's excellent Bootleaf. The resultant reworking of the map is now up and live and looks a whole lot slicker than the original did. Thanks to Bryan's code, it's now browsable and searchable and you can flick between the original set of English places and their Italian counterparts with a single click of the mouse or tap of the screen.

I've mentioned this before but sincere thanks and credit is due to the following people for helping make the map, both deliberately and inadvertently.

• Mark Iliffe for saying to me once that "you should make a map out of that"
• Simone Cortesi for forking the original map code and producing the Mappa dei luoghi il cui nome suona vagamente volgare o bizzarro
• Bryan McBride for making Bootleaf
• All the contributors to the map, on GitHub, by Twitter and by email; thank you one and all

To paraphrase the late, great Terry Pratchett, sometimes making a map is the most fun you can have by yourself.

(P)rude(ntial) by Vladimer Shioshvili on Flickr, CC-BY-SA