Hello world!
Yes, HoustonCrimeStats.org has been left behind - hardly any work has been done to it in over a year… So, my new years resolution is to restore this service to working order and slowly, as time permits, make changes and improvements.
The first step was to correct some permission issues, and to clear out the old temp files created when users generated a chart - I never got around to writing a cleanup script to wipe them out, this eventually caused problems ovbiously.
Now, I’ve decided to start this blog to keep everyone up to date on what’s happening with the site and any changes that are made.
Next, I plan on getting the crime stats data updated (current data stops in Mar 06) and will work on keeping it up to date after that. In the meantime, the google maps API will be removed because it needs to be completely re-done. In the meantime, only historical charts and monthly totals will be available.
I hope to eventually take a closer look at the geocode process I originally created and see if I can’t come up with a better (and hopefully faster) method. Right now it takes at least an hour to geocode a months worth of incidents and has a high failure rate even with multiple lookups and variations performed on the address.
Stay tuned for more… I hope to get the majority of the little things done in the next few weeks, but finishing the data imports might take longer as I don’t plan to sit in front of the computer waiting on it only to fire up the next month for geocoding.
Thanks for your support, ttyl!