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Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup Thingy: Day 12+13 – Dot Com and Cities

May 01, 2007 | 1 Minute Read

So I worked on the mashup quite a bit yesterday. So much that when I was done, I was too tired to write a blog entry about it. I mostly spent yesterday buying the domain name, upgrading my server, and getting the project to work on my “production” server. It wasn’t too difficult; I just needed to move the database, change some names, and make sure there weren’t any old names being used. I also started adding all of the cities on CraigsList to the database. At least, the US ones.

This took a lot of time to do manually. I had to figure out if the area was an actual city, or a bunch of cities, then figure out the geo coordinates, and stuff it into the database. I thought it might be faster to do it by hand than write a script. Nope.

Today I wrote a script that would make the entry faster by automagically getting the coordinates from Google Maps’ http request service. It still took a while, but today I finished inserting almost all of the US cities (excluding the combination ones, since Google can’t do those).

Now all that’s left is for me to make the pop up windows a little prettier, and maybe add a list of the CraigsList listings to the side for easy browsing by price, # of bedrooms, etc. That shouldn’t take too long. Then I can launch the site!