code in the ruins

I just think it's really interesting that Oracle is buying BEA and Sun is buying MySQL, and that both acquisitions were announced on the same day.  That is all.

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.

A while back I was at a small conference in Charlottesville for public affairs types that work at environmental agencies in our region. One of the EPA webmasters gave a presentation about their site. She pointed out that they track the clicks on their website by logging each click in a database. In this way, they can tell which stories are the most popular, and which areas of the page have the highest value and are most visible to users. It has given them data that helps them design their pages.

I liked that idea, so I went home and started to write my own click tracker. What I didn't like about their setup was that each link pointed, not to the actual page that the user wanted, but to a CGI program called "epalink" that would (apparently) log the click, and then bounce the user to the page they really wanted. It's fairly transparent to the users, but I saw a few problems:

• The URL in the status bar is long and ugly
• The page maintainer has to remember to format the links in a certain way
• If applying to a large existing site, changing all the links would be nightmarish

I wanted to work out a way to track links on a page without changing any page body code at all. Since my current interest is JavaScript development, I jumped in and tried to figure out a way to do this the way I wanted.

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