PervWatch.org launched
I probably should have made this anouncement a month ago, but I'd been waiting until I had some automatic updating of the site set up.
I've launched my first personal Ruby on Rails project, PervWatch.org. The site is a Google Maps mashup with sex offender registry data - currently it holds data for New York and California. My timing of anouncing it is a bit off since a competing site has garnered significant media attention. Another lesson learned - anounce and market your site wildly as soon as it is up, so long as it has some basic functionality worth using.
I had initially created the site back in May when chicagocrime.org launched. I was impressed and wanted to map crime data for my hometown of Rochester, NY. Unfortunately my city and county don't publicly provide crime report data. So, looking for other data to map, I remebered some local TV coverage of sex offenders living near daycares and schools. It seemed a good fit, so I quickly whipped up a site to map the offenders.
The site offers a significant improvement on user interface and plain old usability for the data. In NY state, you can search by offender's name, county, or zipcode. The results page simply lists names that are linked to offender's detailed page. Each details page has a link to view the offender's location on a static map. Obviously it can be difficult to get a quick idea of where the offenders live and just how close or far away from you they are. PervWatch.org allows you to drill down to county or zipcode and see all the offenders on a map right away. You can instantly tell where all of the offenders are located. Additionally, you can search by address and the site will do a ~2 mile radius search, displaying all offenders within that range of the input address; the site offers RSS and Atom feeds for each county or zipcode so you can see when a new offender moves in or offender data is updated; and I plan to begin including other states quickly as I move forward - such as adding California yesterday. Please take a look and let me know what you think: good, bad, indifferent, suggestions, etc.
Agile Web Development with Rails is here!
I just received my copy of Agile Development with Rails in the corporate mail today. So for the rest of us cavemen who can't just use the PDFs, the printed version has arrived. Maybe this will bolster my case for Rails in the company. (We went through a lengthy process of a Weighted Peugh chart to "select a web application framework" for the project. I was outnumbered by far and Java/JSF was selected - primarily due to the lack of training and books. However, the whole thing was rather moot. I was the only active developer, and I was more comfortable with Rails - so I continued to use it. Perhaps it's not being a good employee, but I don't think a manager of another division who has no technical knowledge should be deciding how I implement something).Agile Development With Rails is Shipping
It looks like the paper version of Agile Web Development with Rails is shipping. I ordered the book through our corporation's process about a month ago, and I just received an e-mail today with a DHL tracking number. It looks like it left Austin, TX last night at 6:00 p.m. Can't wait to get my hands on a copy that I can read on the couch (without a nice burning sensation from the heat of the laptop).Upgrading to the latest Typo
I've been reading about a number of significant improvements to the Subversion HEAD of Typo, so I decided to give upgrading a shot.
The imminent release of Typo 2.5 includes the sidebar/plugin patch created by Scott Laird, Page Caching, and theming. Please let me know if you see any inconsistencies or problems with the style of the blog now. I tried to quickly port over my old images, layout and styles to a new theme. Also, you should notice this blog being a bit zippier wiht the page caching. Lastly, I'm trying to work out a good way to include the Google ads in the pages. For single-article links, I'd like it if the sidebar ads were not displayed - but I wanted to include the ads as a sidebar static content.
I think perhaps a "Dynamic" sidebar plugin would do the trick. It'd work close to the same as a "Static" plugin, but evaluate the ERb that was included. Or a less ambitiuous "Conditional Static" plugin which is only shown on specific controllers or actions.
A cautionary note: rake migrate doesn't appear to work in SVN head for Typo when simply executing it from the command-line. You need to start up the server with the new code against the old DB and enter the admin pages, where you'll be prompted to upgrade your database.