Update on a Side Project | Hacker News Reader

Update on a Side Project

njgeo.org

70 pointsjohnjreiser11 comments

The part where the author spent many hours to work around shared hosting really resonated with me. As a student I did the same, and some of my sites still bare the (technical) scars.

For example I used static pages, and the included dynamic elements through server side includes (SSI). But once you have multiple such dynamic pieces, they can't easily interact, and it all gets very messy.

And I realized that this is a very limiting approach. I spent much more money on other pastimes. You get a small virtual server for 5EUR/Month or less from OVH or Digital Ocean and probably many other providers. And that's enough for a website of mine that gets around 40k visitors per month.

serious question - why not just get a $4.99 fully functioning VPS from digital ocean or something?

I have one now.

But for me, this was back in 2006/2007 where VPS weren't that cheap, and I was very reluctant committing to recurring payments.

This is a cool project and it's fun to read about how he built it. I would like to see him open source it, so that people could make these for other states. It's also nice, in my opinion, that he gets a little payout from ads and I'm glad it's for something other than some kind of content-in-WordPress-site. Users might see a useful ad if targeting was configured right!

The difficulty in "open sourcing" it is that each state manages its CAMA/assessment/cadastral data differently.

I did open source some of the tools I used to work with New Jersey's data: https://github.com/johnjreiser/NJParcelTools

Nice! I didn't even bother to search, but I should have.

I gotta say, this is a really cool project, I don't see how the end users wouldn't / didn't find the maps interesting or useful. I would love to have one of these for my areas.

Perhaps the pages they were landing on could have been better optimized so users would view the map, or the map could be on every page.

I have added a neighborhood map to each property page, in addition to the Bing "Bird's Eye." I'm also working on a Leaflet-based map of the whole state with the parcel layer. Still thinking over how to handle creating the vector tiles and linking them up to the assessment information. NJ's parcel GIS data gets updated yearly, while the assessment/sales records are updated weekly. I don't want to have the assessment data in the vector tiles, so I've got to perform some matching & retrieving data after they're loaded.

Thanks for sharing this! I use NJParcels all the time to explore the neighborhoods around me. It's really great to learn more about how the site was built.

Thanks! I welcome any feedback you might have on how I can make it even more useful.

Title should be more descriptive, imho.

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