Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Real Progress - 5 digit ZCTAs

It has been 4 months since real progress was made - but tonight represented a real break through. I got the code up and running on my new laptop and transitioned over to using Eclipse, a great IDE that has integrated debugging of Ruby. But talking about how I am developing is not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to breath life into the project once more.

I've gotten many e-mails over the past few months asking for help in creating maps. One person in particular had a very specific ask that I thought would both expand the functionality of the code & test a new data source. For this set of maps, I needed to start mapping 5-digit zip codes (Zip Code Tabulation Areas to the Census), my first foray into zip codes in this work.

As proof of life, enjoy the screenshot below which shows all of the zip codes for the state of Maine, colored with random colors.



Now that the code is running again and I've got some specific projects to get going again, I look forward to getting back to a much more regular schedule. Please keep up the contact.

1 comment:

BrianRees said...

Really cool. In Los Angeles the LA Times has done something similar to make their reporting for all the areas of LA more accurate. They could not purely go off of Zip Codes because it does not reflect the individual areas like Beverly Hills for example. So LA Times used zip codes but also working knowledge to break the Zip Codes down further into Neighborhoods. Your project goes a long to making the great type of work done by the LA Times accessible to citizens of all states.