
I've checked off another long-time JDLand To Do item, this one being to improve the timeliness of the
Crime Reports box down in the right-hand margin.
It used to be that the city offered the reports in an XML feed, but when that disappeared, I had to start going to the
MPD reports page, go through a series of 15 clicks to download a usefully filtered file, open the file, and paste it into an import page I had created. Needless to say, this was not something I was interested in doing daily or even weekly.
But now I've built a new importer that parses a pasted version of the daily crime report sent out on the
MPD-1D mailing list, stuffing each Near Southeast entry into
my crime database.
This also means that I'm now getting additional "method" and "location" information that wasn't coming in the
download from MPD.
I then went back through all non-theft from auto reports for the neighborhood back to the beginning of 2014 and
updated the full database.
I also tweaked the display when you click on the red pushpins on both the homepage map and the archive database map.
I'll probably still need to go do the download from the MPD site every so often, to be sure that the data is complete, but at least now that's not the only way the data is coming in. And while I can't guarantee that this will always be updated daily, it's now a lot less likely to go three or four weeks between updates.