Tonight at 10 on 49 News Topeka — find out if your child is safe from the FREAKING UNBELIEVABLE number of registered sex offenders in T-Town, USA.
Seriously…I think this is a pretty cool and useful Google maps mashup.
It goes live tonight at 10pm in conjunction with a TV news story. You can find it then at 49abcnews.com/sexoffenders/.
View at flickr »
001 // Stuart Frisby // 02.22.2006 // 4:24 PM
wow, thats, pretty crazy. If something like that were published in England, there would be mobs with burning sticks and firebombs going from door to door, people would be killed.002 // Zach Inglis // 02.22.2006 // 4:50 PM
Stuart, I was thinking just the thing. Why does the word “vigilantes” spring to mind, I do wish some nasty things on some of these perverts but there are people in that list with very minor offences.003 // Jeff Croft // 02.22.2006 // 5:14 PM
Yeah, I agree completely. There are definitely folks in in these lists who did things that I personally don’t really consider to be wrong (like, say, an 18 year old having consensual sex with his 16 year old girlfriend). There are also people who made mistakes many, many years ago and have been clean ever since that probably deserve a break. But, most of the folks in here deserve no sympathy at all, in my opinion. That having ben said, all we are doing is displaying already-publicly-available information in a more useful format. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation already publishes this stuff on their website — which is a piece of crap. We’re just making it pretty. And really, what’s better than pretty sex offenders? :)004 // Zach Inglis // 02.22.2006 // 6:24 PM
Glad you agree dude, I was worried you may take my argument wrongly :) Hahaha. Oh why do I think that won’t be the last time I see that.005 // Jeff Croft // 02.22.2006 // 7:16 PM
If you’re interested, the sex offenders tool is now live… www.49abcnews.com/sexoffenders/006 // red&yellow // 02.22.2006 // 8:41 PM
I am doing something similar with Missionaries that my church supports. Did you have to map all the points yourself or did you write some PHP script that pulls from a MySQL database or something? If anyone out there is looking for a project, that would be a good one I think. Create a way to manage information in a database and pull into points on a Google Map using its API. I’m sure there are many people who would find that useful.007 // Jeff Croft // 02.22.2006 // 9:02 PM
red&yellow: We pull the data from the KBI into our database via a web service. The map points are generated dynamically on the fly based on that data. As for specific technology in place, our database is Postgres, not MySQL, and we’re using Python/Django, not PHP. We do use the Google Maps API. I’m not sure quite what you’re referring to in your project idea. I think that’s the way most people already do it, and I’m not sure what needs to be created to make it happen. I think most people simply store their records in a database, give them columns that include latitude and longitude, and then use their scripting or programming language of choice to dynamically pull that information into Google’s Javascript API, which generates the map. The trickiest part of Google maps is usually the geocoding. Goecoding is the processing of taking an address and translating it into latitude and longitude. Google’s API doesn’t provide geocoding services, so you have to do this yourself (or use a third-party service to do it, or use an map API that does include geocoding, like Yahoo’s).008 // Brian E. Ford // 02.23.2006 // 2:50 PM
Out of curiosity I checked my own area code thinking that my affluent neighborhood wouldn’t have any offenders: Wrong! (We have 3) Unfortunately, one of them lives 2 blocks away. Fortunately, he’s merely a 16 year old dork who aggressively (forcibly or something, I don’t remember the exact wording) engaged in sodomy with a 14 year old girl. (Is there any other way to engage in sodomy?) Hehe. No more bending over to pick stuff up when we go out for walks, I guess.