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.