I finally figured out a way to add counties to Google maps. It opens up a whole new world of interactive mapping. I couldn’t think of anything creative or interesting to add to the map except for some coloring to the completely dry counties of North Carolina. According to the NC ABC there are four counties: Clay, Graham, Mitchell, and Yancey.

This is the same display as the previous version except that, the colors have been changed to represent the appropriate parties Republican Red and Democratic Blue. Lets call this V.1.1(I really dont like it, didnt go over as I had planned). All this has given me the new idea to move more locally and map the Pitt County Commisioners Districts and the Greenville City Council Districts. I’ll see if I can put some social engineering to work and drum up some shapefiles for these.

I was able to find a shapefile for Pitt County, wow! This was harder than I thought to just find Pitt County, next I need find the Shapefile for Greenville, and I’ll be able to start on Version 2 of the Greenville Crime Tracker Map.

I was able to get a shapefile of the 108 Congress Congressional Districts from NC One Map. I just turned it into a simple overlay to show you how Greenville was divided. I think I will go a head and call this map 1.0, because I did it in less than 20 minutes, and paid no attention to any of the colors.

For 2.0 I think I will:
-Shade Democrat & Republican areas with color themes appropriate to their party.
-Implement further Zoom In levels.
-Add a simple map to my location.

Again I make no validity to this information. Everything displayed on this map was obtained from The Appalachian Trail Conservancy. More information about the Appalachian Trail can be found there as well as White Blaze (A community of Appalachian Trail Enthusiast). The Appalachian Trail is commonly referred to as the A.T. or White Blaze.

For those who don’t the A.T. stretches 2174 miles from Georgia to Maine. It is marked by 2-by-6-inch (5-by-15-cm) white paint blazes (hence White Blaze).

I make NO claims to the validitity of this information. All locations, times, dates, persons names, and other information used for this program were obtained from a free syndication found at http://www.reflector.com/news/content/includes/rss/policeblotter.xml. I just simply wrote 250 lines of JavaScript to process and XML document that was processed updated and parsed with another 250+ lines of PHP and Perl.

There are some updates for version 2.0 that I am still working on. The more funding the more it is possible for me to work on it (hint!). But for version 2 you can some planed implimentations are.
-Faster Load Times(Using Marker Manager)
-The ability to switch between Yahoo & Google Maps(For thoes Die Hard Yahoo Fans)
-The Add to My Google Maps Button
-A Cool Calander For The Date Range
-Crimes With Pictures(Awsome…, maybe)
-Some more crime categories(Arrest, etc)… but there seriously was a bombing in Greenville, North Carolina(NC, N.C.) check only bombing and for date range select year.
-A slide bar for the crime radius.
-Support for browsers other than IE7. (I hate Macs and Mozilla anyways so it doesnt bother me If you cant see my maps!)
-Full Outlines of Pitt County and Greenville…
-A true map my address(currently using geocoding to map, will be switched to local search)