Tue, 04 Dec 2012

Open Data Reno at Hack4Reno

I had a great time this weekend at the 2nd annual Hack4Reno working on Open Data Reno, a hub to identify both available data pertinent to Reno and unfulfilled needs for data. The site is built on a WordPress theme started by Colin Loretz at last year’s hackathon, and this year I jumped in along with John Jusayan, Jeremy Murray, and Josh Infiesto to get it operational. I worked on improving the theme with Colin, and also locating and populating the site with data. In the process of doing that I learned more about a couple of useful sites for scraping, scrubbing, re-interfacing, and hosting difficult data sets. One is Cosm, where I found the most accessible air quality index data for Reno. The other is ScraperWiki, where I wrote a scraper to collect and present Reno water quality data from the very unstructured water authority lookup page. Fun!

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Fri, 12 Aug 2011

Congressional Hunger Center – DataTables!

I did a lot of custom WordPress development for this site, but the highlight is the browsing interface for their large library of publications. Publications are presented in a table using the great open source DataTables jQuery plugin. We needed even more filtering abilities to refine the table contents, so I wrote an add on for DataTables to allow filtering the table based on unique values in the table columns. You have to play with it to get how cool this is! Geo Mashup is also featured in the global map of partner sites.

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Tue, 16 Feb 2010

WordPress GPX Viewer Plugin

People like me who use a GPS unit to track their movements often end up with a GPX file full of incomprehensible data at some point. There are many ways to make sense of the data using maps and graphs, but my favorite so far is Jürgen Berkemeir’s GPX Viewer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t clear how to make good use of it in a WordPress post. To remedy that, and add some US English user features (while preserving the German and metric originals), I worked up a new WordPress plugin. It’s quite simple and lightly tested at this point, but feel free to take it for a spin.

  • Only non-commercial use is allowed to comply with Berkemeir’s license requirements. WordPress repository plugins are not allowed to have this restriction (they must be GPLv2 compatible), so I won’t be able to make it available for automatic installation.
  • github page has downloads and updates
  • Sample Viewer:
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Tue, 07 Oct 2008

WordPress Tally Graph Plugin

I’ve released a new plugin that I use to create the bar graphs in my blog sidebar. I’m going to try to host it almost entirely on the WordPress site, so this may be the only post about it here. Here’s the link:

Tally Graph Plugin at WordPress.org

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