Several months back I published a link to a Sacramento Zip Code map that another webmaster had published.  It was amazing how many people clicked through to the blog post with that link, so clearly lots of folks are interested in finding out where one zip code begins and another ends.  I guess snail mail is still popular.

Ever since, every so often I’d think to myself that I wanted a better zip code map if I could lay my hands on one.  Better in this case meant something resizable, clickable, that sort of thing — the kind of thing someone publishing web pages containing real estate in certain zip codes or another would consider “better”.

Also, better meant I’d be able to use it without spending a lot of money and / or violating someone else’s copyright, which I had a feeling the guy I was linking to was doing.

Well, it turns out that everything I found was either worse, very expensive, or also subject to copyright.

As I was looking into how to get Googlemaps to do such a trick, I came across Matt Cutts’ Fun With Zip Codes article, which has little enough to do with Googlemaps (except by way of showing you what you might need to know once you’ve looked up the appropriate Googlemaps API, which is GPolygon).  But the article does show you to have fun with zip codes (as promised), if by fun you mean using an open source plotting tool and US census data to draw the picture above.

Well, yes, that’s fun, assuming one can make James Joyce roll over in his grave at the same time.

blog comments powered by Disqus