Introducing Sac Traffic dot Org
After thinking it through a little bit I decided a while back to run with the Traffic on Twitter thing and do it up right. The result: sactraffic.org.
I used that same XML feed from the CHP and in addition to Twittering new incidents I created a local JSON feed of just Sacramento area incidents and “mashed up” some geocoding/mapping, local news, videos and even local weather.
Hopefully this makes a simple, yet useful, tool for folks as there are RSS feeds that can be tailored to a particular set of streets or freeways (think: check your commute in your RSS reader before you leave for the day) and what’s even slicker is using Twitter’s new “track” feature to get live updates on traffic incidents at the street or freeway level right to your phone.
Most of this was made possible by the Google Feed and Maps APIs.
It’s been a fun hobby project and was a good refresher on JavaScript which I was getting rusty at (and perhaps still am). Clearly my design skills still suck (hey, anyone have a line on decent traffic icons for Google Maps?).
I’m serious when I say “hobby project” as I’ve tried really hard to keep work on this limited to my spare time at home. I have plenty of work-type work to do at work, messing around with stuff like this at work would probably be frowned upon.
Anyway, I stuck a big ol’ Google AdSense ad on it so if it gets popular maybe I can subsidize my caffeine habit ;).
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