August 16, 2005, 1:31 AM ET
New chicagocrime.org feature: Crimes along a route
I've added a Crimes along a route page to chicagocrime.org. It lets you draw a route on the map of Chicago and displays crimes that have been reported along that route.
Say you walk home from the El station every day at around 7 p.m. Using this feature, you can draw your route, select a time range (7 to 8 p.m., perhaps) and narrow down crimes by crime type -- and the site will tell you which crimes happened near that route.
You can bookmark any route (example), so you don't have to redraw it each time you visit the site. For this feature, I was inspired by the excellent Gmaps Pedometer.
I'd like to add RSS feeds for a particular route, but I fear that would put way too much of a load on the database. That feature (and a bunch of others) will have to wait until I have the finances to get a faster server -- preferably more than one.
