alov

For the past some nights this week that I've had time, I've been working on a Bay Area restaurant map thingy.

I've been collecting menus in a looseleaf folder for a while now and had always had an inkling of how neat it'd be to put the menus online. After I showed my menu folder to Master, she wanted to put comments on dishes and restaurants to know whether or not to go there in the future or to try. I then said I'd feel some obligation to put it online, given that my GIS background.

I eventually searched for free map serving software. My criteria: it had to be self-contained. As nice and robust as it'd be to have something like MySQL or Oracle as a backend, I don't feel comfortable about doing that unless it was my own server that I could do whatever I wanted with it. And great if it could deal with shapefiles. And other stuff. For something free, I'd say ALOV does enough of what I want.

So the last few nights were spent trying to figure out how to get data to show up (the accent mark above the 'e' in "cafe" screwed things up some) and how the thing operates in general. I also showed the thing to my sister and she says I should work faster on it and make a random-restaurant-picker and make money off of it. I'll prolly just incorporate the driving directions suggestion instead if possible. I also tried putting the Bay Area minor roads on but the application said it was too much for it. I may consider having to do it county by county...

Other things I have to do/try are: get more symbols for the other food types, scan in the menus for the locations that don't have a web site associated with it, hook up prolly an Access database to incorporate posting comments, incorporating the search and layout to fit my web site.

whee.