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September 29, 2005
Foople
From the point of view of a geek who likes to hack, the best part of Google Maps isn't just the stunning user interface, but also the cool things you can do with the Google Maps API. Recently, after a pleasant dinner appointment with friends, my digestive system had to face less than pleasant consequences. It wasn't anything serious and in any case, I really am not exposed to as much danger as my animal-eating friends. At that point, hopeless geek that I am, I was already itching to hack something up with the Google Maps API. Suddenly a project idea popped into my head.
Foople combines location data from Google Maps and restaurant inspection data from the New York Department of Health and Mental Health to provide an overview of the hygienic practices of New York area restaurants. I used Perl to screen scrape Department of Health pages for restaurant inspection data and generate an XML data file with all this information. This data file is the input to some code that displays this information on Google Maps. I'll do a more detailed writeup about the various hacks I had to do to get Foople working. But before I get around to memoizing the hacking experience properly, I thought I'd push out this alpha version so people can play around with it.
Eat safely!
Posted by Vishy at September 29, 2005 08:49 PM