euicho.com

« Photo Update DIY Psudo-Album Project »

Maine Power Outages Map

// March 5th, 2009 // Software and Web Design // Print Article //

Working in a NOC, I often consult the two Maine power companies that have online outage information (there is a third that does not have such a feature). If I see many circuits go down at the same time I’ll check to see if there is an outage in the area by checking both those websites, then going to Google maps to see how far away the sites are from the current outages. This is a tedious process and I finally decided to do something about it by creating my own Google map with their wonderful API. I’d never used it before so this proved a great way to learn how to use it as well. After setting up the screen scraping to pull info off the power companys’ websites, getting the app to do just what I wanted, and working around some minor speed bumps, it’s done!

Google’s API is quite easy to work with, and I’m very pleased with the results. For most people this map isn’t very useful, and at any one time there are only a few markers plotted on it, but for myself it will be quite useful, and it was a great learning process. You can view the Maine Power Outages map at http://euicho.com/power

Tags: maine, maps, programming, projects, utility

Related posts

• Twoosh Spotter: A Greasemonkey Script (0)
• RDP, APs, JOBZ, and BMG (0)
• Monospaced fonts CAN scale (2)