Urban hacking redux
2009-04-02 16:09:24.318613+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Follow up to my urban hacking notes on trying to make Petaluma data re-purpose-able. The city uses Accela to track building permits. The forms that Accela uses are largely JavaScripted, but a little judicious use of Wireshark and WWW::Mechanize and I managed to make it give up some secrets. No guarantees that these links will stick around for long, but...
If you pull up a page that allows you to overlay GeoRSS, such as http://googlemapsapi.blogspot....rss-support-added-to-google.html or http://openlayers.com/dev/examples/georss.html , you can paste in
http://www.flutterby.net/petaluma/buildingpermits.rss
to their source, and go browse the last two day's building permits on a map.
No cron job is keeping that updated right now, there's lots that could be fixed, bla bla bla, that's just a quick and dirty "hey, if you made it easier for us to get to the data..." demo.