My Little World

I created an SDF account for Matt, and to make it easier for me to bundle and share the website prototype for him I'm moving the link to another folder. So here it is, it should behave the same as the previous links

All I can say is I've skipped working out all week so I can wrap my head around jQuery and all I can show for it is an ugly little slider bar. I spent a lot of time worrying about the presentation of the data obtained by rentrent.org. It's got many errors since Craigslist posts do not follow a specific format. I've seen data points for apartments in Ahwatukee plotted in central Phoenix because the post does not have a proper address listed. It seems that when this happens rentrent will just plot the apartment in the middle of the city! I also spent a lot of time this week understanding javascript's asynchronous function calls. I try to set the rentrent.org data into a global variable and then use that data in the next line of code, only to find out the variable is undefined because the rentrent callback is not done executing. When I start learning more about AJAX there will be more of this happening, now I know. There is a lot to learn about jQuery, but at least there are plenty of examples and documentation for me to go through. That's why I chose to use it instead of mootools. My biggest hurdle is understanding how to deal with asynchronous function calls and how the jQuery event handler works. The website will get prettier as I learn more about the library. I would like to see the map load faster. I would like to spend the time working on caching the apartment search results onto the server, so future calls for a certain region will load faster on subsequent use. Data filtering and marker rendering should also be done server side in the hopes of a speedup. I need to figure out how to do that using AJAX. I would also like to have a copy of the entire craigslist apartment listings for the country, in case rentrent.org goes down for some reason. I've already experienced a problem with their server changing things while I was querying it during the day. They changed the maximum listing from 1500 apartments down to something like 1200, causing my website to crash without warning. My goal for this week is to finish reading "Learning Javascript", "Map Scripting 101", and learn more jQuery. Over time I expect to become faster at this web development thing.

So here is the usual link to the prototype: Apt Prototype

I don't know why mod_perl is having such a tough time generating the html neededfor adding a sidebar and CSS references to the map generation page. After tweaking and testing it appears to be a problem with the SDF web server. After a while the server won't even reference the front page of the prototype. Oddly enough this blog has no problem showing up.