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content/blog/mapping-states-visited.md

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+---
+title: "Mapping the states I visited"
+date: 2024-02-01T18:30:00-05:00
+draft: false
+tags: []
+math: false
+medium_enabled: false
+---
+
+[Henrique's Impossible List](https://hacdias.com/impossible-list/) shows a list of countries that they've visited so far and their goals for the future. I personally have not travelled to many countries, but I have visited a several US states!
+
+Instead of presenting the states in a list, I thought it would be very cool to visually show it on a map. Ideally the map would be encoded in a SVG so that:
+
+- The image will scale regardless of the device size
+- I can manually edit the source to show the visited regions
+
+Now imagine my surprise after searching on [Kagi](https://kagi.com/) to come across a SVG in the public domain on [Wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blank_US_Map_(states_only).svg). Even better, the following is shown near the top of the file
+
+```css
+/* Individual states can be colored as follows: */
+.ks,.mt,.pa {fill:#0000FF}
+.ca,.de {fill:#FF0000}
+/* In this example, Kansas, Montana and Pennsylvania are colored blue,
+and California and Delaware are colored red.
+Place this code in the empty space below. */
+```
+
+Such an elegant way of coloring in the states! Now it's up to me to come up with some categories. As of the time of writing, I decided on:
+
+- Green: Places I've lived
+- Blue: Places I've visited
+- Darker Gray: Places I've driven through
+
+Here's how I colored by map:
+
+![Map of US States colored by whether I've visited](/files/images/usa_visited.svg)
+
+For the last couple weeks, I've been brainstorming new pages for my website and came up with https://brandonrozek.com/visited.
+
+At the time of writing, it only has the colored in states and a list of cities I've been to. Though I'm welcome to any suggestions you might have. Feel free to [get in touch!](/contact)