Mapbox and Tippecanoe Tutorial

1. Find your data ! Census blocks and a lot of other shapefiles are available from the census website at https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php and the specific population data is included in these files ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010BLKPOPHU/
2. Install tippecanoe (https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe)

# on MacOS
brew install tippecanoe
# on Ubuntu
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe.git
cd tippecanoe
make -j
make install

3. Get the file, unzip, convert to geojson (might have to install GDAL for ogr2ogr, brew install gdal)

curl -L -O {URL}/{file-name}.zip
unzip {file-name}.zip
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON {file-name}.geojson {file-name}.shp

4. Convert to mbtiles (much smaller!): tippecanoe -zg -o {file-name}.mbtiles --drop-densest-as-needed --extend-zooms-if-still-dropping {file-name}.geojson
5. Install mapbox cli: pip install mapboxcli
6. Export mapbox token (ask me if you need it, different from mapbox key): export MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN={TOKEN}
7. upload the file: mapbox upload representable-team.{name} {file-name}.geojson
8. now you can edit the javascript

map.addSource("source-name", {
  type: "vector",
  url: "mapbox://representable-team.{name}"
});

Make sure when you do map.addLayer(), you add "source": "{source-name}" and "source-layer": "{file-name}"! you are done