Automatically create gists, then load into geojson.io?

[daguar]

Right now, the data gets to geojson.io by making the entire geojson a string, and adding it as a URL parameter that we redirect the user to.

For data objects with a large number of elements, the URL becomes too long, causing failure (for example data that fails, click here).

An alternative approach would be to POST the data to a new GitHub gist, and then load the data via geojson.io's id=gist URL parameter.

(Commence Dave opining) Fundamentally, I think this is a user experience question:

• If the goal is to let people very easily view their data, then this might work (though it does create a lot of anonymous gist garbage.)
• If the goal is to have a design that persuades people into putting their data up on GitHub in a structured way, then maybe it's worth giving them a carrot to log in, and focus the experience design on publishing (e.g., naming, organizing by repo, etc.)

For the genesis of this issue, see the following long-ass Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/PhillyCDO/status/432524619015135233

[daguar]

An alternative approach might be to have explicit UX stages:

• Convert to GeoJSON, and display on the same page
• With map shown, provide 2 big buttons:
  • "Publish this data on GitHub with one-click" (gets you to log in to GitHub, then add to repo/gist)
  • "Edit this data" (probably also asks you to log in to GitHub, but then loads it into geojson.io)

[daguar]

Another alternative: use S3 bucket w/ regular data deletion (per @bensheldon)