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One of the maps I’d like to put together here is a Sacramento blog map.
There are quite a few good blogs out there in Sac. I have a short list of them on my blog roll at the Sacramento Real Estate Blog, but I’m sure I could come up with several more great ones with a little research. I just bumped into this awesome Sacramento Food Blog, Sacatomato, for example.
One service I’d like to offer to the local blogging community is not just to create a map of the blogs, though that’s interesting in itself, but to perhaps develop over time one of more maps of points of interest that bloggers suggest. Sacatomato might want to work on a restaurant map, for example. Or I might work with Walk Sacramento or the Sacramento Walking Sticks to put together either waking maps or maps to starting points for walks that others are sponsoring.
The more I look at the possibilities for creating maps for the Sacramento County region, the more it appears to me that the real ultimate goal of this project goes way beyond the real estate maps that the site began with (and that I’m continuing to develop).
Mark Twain once said that golf is a walk spoiled.
I took a walk recently. I didn’t spoil it with golf, but I did embellish it with overengineering.
A simple stroll, correctly overengineered, becomes a Sacramento Map Blog nerdfest.
The walk itself was in the Fabulous Forties, one of my favorite Sacramento neighborhoods. In fact the walk was an event, sponsored by the Sacramento Walking Sticks. The nice Volkssport folks have been 
overengineering walks a lot longer than I have, and at one time I used to like going on many of their events.
Turning this walk through the Fabulous Forties into a map blog nerdfest took a bit more doing. First, going out there, naturally I needed to use the new TomTom, which got me there just fine, as expected.
Once there I was pretty much in walking mode, so I picked up my event map in the designated location and got going. I was originally going to take a set of Fabulous Forties pictures, but getting out there, I realized I didn’t have as much time as I wanted. Moreover, the best photos I could have taken were of peoples’ houses, and as much as I wanted to embellish the walk with overengineering, the walk was still more important than getting a bunch of photo releases. So for the walk I was pretty free of any special technological trappings.
Once home, though, of course I wanted to map out the walk, so I first had to find an application to draw the points. It turns out the Gmaps Pedometer was just the thing. This application allows you to draw your waypoints, ticking off the miles (and, optionally, the calories) as you go.
Clicking through from there to the GMaptoGPX utility showed how to convert the map route into a GPX (a standard format for GPS data — more on GPX here).
Once you have the map data in GPX format, you have created a file that is the perfect food for the outstanding free GPSVisualizer web site. Among other things, you can create the map above.
Of course, how overengineered would a walk be if all we got out of it were one image and one data format? GPSVisualizer doesn’t stop there, but allows you to get your data into KML format so Google Earth can read it. (In principle you can also create Google Maps directly but I’ve had less success with this feature). So having driven to your walk using a GPS device, you can then plot your walk on a map, store it as GPS data, then convert that data into a Google Earth to “fly” there in Google Earth.
Can we generate the GoogleMap from GPSVisualizer as well? Sure we can.
One walk. Three maps. Two data formats (three if you count the Javsascript for the map).
So much for golf.
At the risk of disappointing my throng of fan (singular intended, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Jeff), my map output has been a little off lately. However, the good news is that with all the distractions from software development (like really getting paid to be a real estate broker, which kind of sucks up my time being my “day job” and all), I’ve managed to do a fairly decent update to the listings database that underlies most of the content here (and on two or three other web sites).
Granted this is all underneath the hood, but you might find that some of the pages are showing a lot more listings than they were. Of course, the down side is that now that we’re starting to have a non-trivial amount of data in the database, I need to put on my MySQL database admin hat to get the speed back up to what it was. Do I have a MySQL database admin hat? I guess I do now. Indexes are your friend. Or to be pedantic about it, indices are your friend.
The good news is that I now have about three months of recent active listing data, along with about a year, for Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado, and Yolo Counties. That’s about where I wanted to be as a baseline, so now I can just do an update every few days to stay current. That means I can focus a bit over the several weeks on some other tasks, to the extent that work doesn’t cut a whole in my whole day.
Does My Development To Do List Really Belong on the So-Called Internet?
Yep.
Some of the other tasks ahead include:
- Fixing up the neighborhood pages, like this one, so they’re not in a cheesy development state. Break out the actives from the solds and show more of everything, while at the same time adding some listing maps.
- Creating a UI where users can add points of interest for Sacramento, and to jump start that, begin by inviting local bloggers / webmasters to add their blogs.
- Advertise (or “feature”) your listing would be a nice touch. Who has time?
- Get some better front ends going for pages like our main city page. A zip code map for the whole county is fairly trivial but also likely to be somewhat fat. If it is fat, that could be solved by just mapping centers instead of outlines.
- Before or after fixing what a main city list looks like, wire El Dorado, Yolo, and Placer County as well. I’m thinking that rather than spinning off most of these to existing county web sites, we might put it all up here, and do a sort of hyperglobalmeganet deal on it. And then of course…
- Flesh out the neighborhood database for those counties as well, and add more for Sacramento.
- Clean up the CSS all over. The look and feel so far is pretty amateurish.
- If I get the writer new hire I’m hoping for, work with her on how the neighborhood or city level content all fits in. If you get the UI right for the user adding points of interest feature, that’ll help.
So far this project reads more like a wish list and is seriously in need of some project management. Darn it — project manager hat. Granted, 2,000+ pages or so of long-tail search content probably works pretty well even if it’s cheesy, but having a killer Web 2.0 app running at the root or in a directory somewhere wouldn’t hurt a bit.
For several months now my clients have wondered where the GPS navigation system is in my car. The answer was that it was the Sacramento County Thomas Guide sitting on the back seat. Recently I finally broke down, succumbing to the self-imposed pressure of being the premier (only) Sacramento Map Blogger, and purchased a TomTom One. This unit is TomTom’s entry level navigation system, and my first impressions are that I like it quite a bit. Originally I had been looking at the TomTom 910 at about $200 more or the TomTom One XL (which is basically the TomTom One with a little more screen space). However, as I played with the one and with the 910 in the store a bit, it struck me that the extra screen space was not something I needed, since even an old guy like me could read the map on the TomTom One screen fairly well.
Of course, there was the usual bubble pack to contend with.
Bubble pack is the scourge of technological society.
Other than that, my experience was mostly positive. The user interface was quite simple to use. To be honest, I know a Realtor with a $660 per month car payment with a Navigation system that has a somewhat simpler interface, but given that I got the whole system out the door for less than half of a single car payment, I’m happy.
One of the features of the 910 is the Text-To-Speech, which allows the unit to call out road names instead of saying a more generic “In 400 yards, turn right”. In practice I’ve found that The TomTom One’s generic street names have not been a problem at all. Having the TomTom One on and talking to me made getting where I was going pretty much a no brainer.
There was only one area (quite near my house) where the street configuration had changed recently where the TomTom got confused. To give the unit its due, however, this was after I’d selected that street as an alternate route. The primary route probably would have worked without a hitch.
Right now I’m going to take the unit out to see how it does in a more live scenario. When I don’t get lost, I’ll report back.
Google Earth image shows a pilot’s eye view of the Cameron Park Airport (someone else’s kmz file).
Well, that’s more or less a pilot’s eye view. Your real pilot sort of fellow, who hangs out at the coffee shop (kmz file), would probably tell you that with this sort of setup I’d likely fly off the end of the runway or something.
They’d probably have a better word for setup to like “approach” or some sort of pilotese.
I’m just starting to mess around with Google Earth.
What sort of map blogger would I be if I didn’t mess around with Google Earth?
If you need to find the middle of the airport, it’s more or less at 38.683902 -120.987506. That of course, newly minted map geeks like me, is latitude and longitude, respectively.
By the way, if you copy and paste 38.683902 -120.987506 into Google’s search box, it thinks you want to use the calculator, but clicking on the maps link straigtens it out quite nicely, and you end up in the right place. Yahoo pretty much gets puzzled, but clicking on Yahoo maps and then running it works fine.
Good old Microsoft, God bless them. When you try this query in Live Search, you end up in North Dakota.
I don’t need to speak pilot to understand that condition: lost.
Windows is no way to run a planet.
This being a new blog about maps, yesterday I started to think about what sorts of categories and topics might spin out of that. In other words, what might we end up talking about?
One major category is mashups, since publishing mashups is more than half the reason for this blog’s existence. Related to that are all the things one might want to mash: Schools, Neighborhoods (Subdivisions), Homes for Sale, Sold Homes, Foreclosures, Short Sales, Shopping, Parks, etc., etc. This is basically the list of anything we can grow a local database for.
Getting into the mashups fever may take us frequently well outside Sacramento as we make honorable mention of other sites.
This is also a huge potential learning area where we have the ability to bounce ideas off others and make the site really cool.
There is the user side of the mashup equation, and if we feel like getting extra nerdy, there’s the developer side — where we explore the APIs and tools.
Beyond that there are topics directly related to types of maps. Health and Safety seems to be a huge one as I look over many of the government offerings. Recreation is one that comes up a lot. Real Estate is obviously one that I’m interested in.
Then there are special-purpose or special-resolution maps. Key ideas here are topographical maps, bike maps, walking maps, and the like. Where do you get these? What’s available? On the real estate side you can talk about parcel maps and subdivision maps.
Now then, paper or silicon? There are several traditional navigational topics we might want to explore, such as orienteering and map reading. On the silicon side are all the modern tools and the topics that arise from that: Global Positioning System (GPS), geocaching, and the like. So there’s a “tools and technology” category that’s quite possible.
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