code in the ruins

I read a lot of record reviews over at Pitchfork, and when something sounds good, I usually jump over to Last.fm to listen to it, or to remind myself to check it out again later. For a long time, I've been meaning to write up a Greasemonkey script for Firefox to generate the Last.fm link for me, so I don't have to type it in every time. You know, because that's so hard.

Anyway, I'm working on an, ahem, not tremendously exciting project at work, so I finally got around to it. I went ahead and made it extensible for other links besides Last.fm, so it can do links to iLike and Wikipedia, too; others are easy to add if you're reasonably familiar with Javascript. The script adds the links right next to the album artwork, right below the links to Emusic, digg, del.icio.us, and so on.

I posted it on userscripts.org. I currently have a hundred or so back reviews to read, so hopefully I'll have saved net keystrokes by the time I catch up.

Update: added links to IsoHunt, Mininova, and the Pirate Bay, by request.  I can't test right now because I'm on Firefox 3 RC2 and Greasemonkey doesn't work there yet.  But you can get the new version right here for now.  I will update it on userscripts.org as soon as I get it tested.

Been playing with Yahoo! Pipes. I was intrigued by a Lifehacker post I saw a while back about creating your own master feed by pulling in feeds from around the web and squishing them together. So I did it.

My master feed now includes:

• My posts on this blog
• My posts on my other blog
• My posts on last.fm
• My photos on Flickr
• My videos on YouTube
• My del.icio.us bookmarks
• Songs I've submitted to last.fm, and
• Comments I've written on my blogs.

I also created a pipe for the posts by themselves, which I can use to import all of my posts into Facebook as notes (Facebook only imports items from one feed at a time). Kinda cool. I imagine there's more stuff out there to pull in, but it's a pretty good start.

I recently put together a new website, HenricoCrime.org. It's a crime data/Google Maps mashup in the style of ChicagoCrime.org and RichmondCrime.org.

The crime data comes from the Henrico County, VA police department website… the heavy lifting is handled by a set of PHP classes that search the site and scrape the HTML for event data. I use Yahoo's geocoding service to find the latitude and longitude of each event. I first tried Google's but I found that it guessed wrongly too often… Henrico County has several different localities, and I have no way of knowing which one I'm looking for. Google will return hits on similar street names in the wrong places, where Yahoo is more strict. I then store the whole mess in a MySQL database on my server.

All that happens on the backend - the website itself just queries the database and assembles a Google Map with info markers for each event. I also generate some basic statistics from the database for each day.

The other interesting bit is The Cloud. I was trying to think of interesting ways to display trends over a long period of time… The Cloud loads hundreds of crime events at once and marks each one with a tiny, nearly transparent dot on the map. As events stack up in the same place, the marks become darker. So if you pull in a few thousand events, you can see where much of the police activity is happening. Generally, it seems like many of the events cluster along the main roads in suburban Richmond. The best places to be, crime-wise, appear to be Glen Allen (the area in the North right around 295), and eastern Henrico (which is mostly rural).

I'd like to keep coming up with different ways of looking at the data; for instance, weekly, monthly, and annual statistics, breakdowns by crime type, RSS feeds, etc. Most events have more data than I'm actually displaying here, so there should be some other possibilities.

Oh, and I also recently completed a site for my aunt, who runs Connections Speech-Language Therapy in Boerne, TX. So, shameless plug there.