March the 5th 2013 marked the 501st birthday of Gerardus Mercator, whose map projection appears on virtually every web map you'll find on the interwebs today. It appears he's none too happy about the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn't Mercator's.

I've been using a lot of Natural Earth's vector data to make maps recently and so Tom Patterson's rather beautiful Natural Earth projection seemed fitting and avoided the wrath of Gerardus into the bargain.

Continuing my dabblings in Mike Bostock's D3, reworking the Countries That Do And Don't Cry For Me map that did the rounds on the internet some years back took up a couple of spare hours last night; making maps is addictive it seems.

The full map is here, hosted on maps.geotastic.org ... and for those who don't get the cultural reference, this song from a certain 1970's musical might help.

After yesterday's admittedly bleak look at how not to use a map, I thought it worthwhile to look at a far more upbeat use of a map. This particular gem has been doing the rounds for a long long time, but I've no idea where it originated from (if you know, then please let me know in the comments).

As a map it's a fairly simple affair, inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber's and Tim Rice's 1978 musical Evita, showing which countries should and which countries shouldn't cry for you.

So now you know.