Shady Project: Category Mapping

Geographic Product Finder

Shady — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:30:00 -0700

So, another school project of mine ends up on the web: WorldBuy. It started life as my final project for CSE486 (Distributed Systems) but I liked it so much I decided to put it online.

Basically, you can click on a region and it will give you some general information about where you clicked. You can then search amazon for products related to that area. Products can be saved per region, and ranked so that a user can see what other people think are good products for a given place.

It's very, very, very beta at the moment. No user accounts, no per user places or products, and the search itself isn't particularly refined, but I think there is a lot of potential here.

It is also serving as a testbed for the new features I added to the geonames rubygem I wrote about in a previous blog post. The site makes use of both the paid account support, and the country info method. I made a custom rubygem with the new geonames features, and this site currently uses that.

I have a bunch of plans for features to add to this site, and I intend to keep working on this site. If you use it and like it, or don't like it, let me know!

Mapping Immigration and Language

Shady — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:39:00 -0700

For a final project in one of my classes, I made some maps of New York State language usage and foreign born population (the only measure of 'immigration' that the census bureau keeps track of).

The maps and a discussion about how they were made can be found here

Share and enjoy, if you have any comments leave them attached to this blog post.

In different area codes....

Shady — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:49:00 -0700

This is, without a doubt, the best map I have ever seen. I'm actually jealous that I didn't think of it first. You can find a larger version of it here.