Over the last few weeks I started showing some new Google maps for Roseville and other areas in Placer County.  I had some fun putting that together, but working with the map data turned out to be rather tedious, especially since my goal is to provide similar maps for all of Sacramento County soon.

The data you need for drawing zip code boundaries is publicly available, but in a rather unusual text file format.  Unusual text file format, you say?   Any  programmers reading this are no doubt ready to shout:  Use PERL!  Those of you who aren’t programmers may be amused to learn that PERL is an acronym for a programming language, which stands for either Practical Extraction and Reporting Language or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.  What’s worse, the people who support the latter definition are more likely to be PERL advocates!  Given those two definitions, you can see that if you have some rubbish that needs to be listed, PERL has the right stuff.

If there were seven circles in Geek heaven, PERL would sit somewhere darned close to the middle of number seven.

Anyway, after a couple of pleasant hours last night and a whopping 49 lines of PERL code, I had the unusual format transformed into a database ready script.  With another day or two of heads-down work, I should be in a position to map out Sacramento County rather nicely.

The Sacramento County mapping project will probably live on our new Elite Properties Company Web Site, which in turn was resurrected from the ashes of our not-doing-too-much other Sacramento site.

As an aside, big company web sites have been recently criticized for having pictures of agents with no real biographical information behind them.  However, as we’ve proven with our agent pages, you don’t need to be big for that.

Really given the way this is unfolding the real estate mapping category should become a blog of its own on the other site, but I’ve found that whenever I have more than two blogs going, only two end up getting my attention anyway.  

Maybe I can just recuse myself from Amador County.

I’ve always wanted to recuse myself from someplace.

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