I think that this is the syntax that I will use for talking about my projects.  I’ll refer to them by the folder that they are in.  In this case, my little Wall Street Journal stalking project will be referred to as /wsj.

So what is /wsj?  The project serves a couple of purposes for me.  One, I’ve always wanted to use an API and Google seemed to be as good as any provider to play with.  Two, I get the Wall Street Journal delivered to my house on a daily basis.  A couple of months ago, they added mailing labels to the paper.  At first I thought this was annoying – because it covered up the leftmost item on the front page.  Then I switched over to it being comical.  I noticed that I wasn’t getting “my” paper.  The label was crossed out with black marker and tried to conceal the name and address on the label.  The black marker doesn’t conceal anything.

I figured that I could log all of the address and then throw pins in a Google Map to show where the WSJ subscribers in my neighborhood lived.

The project has been started and I have a page right now that draws a map and puts pins in there.  The next few to do’s are to:

  • make the enter page a little more user friendly
  • check the entered address against the others in the database already
  • tag the address to a date
  • make the pins “clickable” for additional information
  • switch over to using an xml document instead of a long java script loop

I’ll keep this updated as I make progress towards those ends.