Mashup: Dirty restaurants on Google Maps
Recently the NSW Food Authority started publishing data on fines levied against food establishments. (See Register of penalty notices.) Seeing an opening for a useful mashup, I figured out how to scrape their website data, geolocate the addresses, and plot them onto a map:
I’ll be maintaining the page properly at http://electronsoup.net/?page_id=148. Tools used were:
- BatchGeocode to convert addresses to latitude and longitude
- Yahoo Pipes to convert the data into KML format
- Inline Google Maps plugin for Wordpress by Avi Alkalay
- My own PHP skills to scrape the page data
Sean Halliday:
Nice site. Would love to get something like this for my area.
I’ve create a website using Google Maps and would love to hear some feedback on layout, color scheme, ease of navigation etc….
The site is:
http://www.thetricitiesbest.com
Thank you in advance for your time,
Sean B. Halliday
22 October 2008, 4:27 amLindsay Holmwood:
That’s awesome. I actually just launched a site that does exactly the same thing:
http://gotgastro.com/
You beat me to the punch by over a month though.
12 December 2008, 4:23 pmtim:
Lindsay, that’s a great domain name. Glad somebody with better programming chops than me has had a crack at this; love what you’ve done with it so far.
16 December 2008, 10:10 am