Adrian Holovaty Quotations

Since its launch, I haven't spent much time on it, other than adding a few features such as color-coded map markers and ZIP code browsing.

My background is pretty evenly split between journalism, databases and computer programming, and this was an opportunity to combine all three. My goal for the project was to create a useful resource for Chicagoans.

From my limited experience looking at other such packages, ours is much less expensive and better software than the currently existing proprietary tools on the market. Also, it's based on open source technologies, which means there's no vendor lock-in.

I was looking for a side project to work on when I stumbled upon the Citizen ICAM site. That site is very useful, but I thought I could create a site that supplemented it by offering additional ways of sorting and searching the data.

Unfortunately the ICAM site doesn't provide an RSS feed or any other sort of data-export capability, so my program does screen scraping, which is essentially retrieving a Web page and programmatically 'reading' the page to grab the data.