chrisgilmerproj

For the last two weeks I've been engrossed in KML files.  I love the idea of generating geo-specific data to share with others.  In my case it was data concerning my professional engineering fraternity, Theta Tau.  I'm helping to launch a new website and I want to take advantages of services like Google Maps to keep our fraternity map up to date and interactive for our members. To do this project I first found data from the US Census Bureau in a text format I could parse with Python.  Then I made a text file of all the fraternity specifi data I wanted to display.  The life saver was something called Element Tree for Python.  I understand that it's a standard feature in Python 2.6, but I still installed it using MacPorts (which convinces me every day to switch to a mac). Once I had the Element Tree imported in my Python program I found that generating the KML file was a snap.  The most difficult part was actually locating the image files that Google uses for the pins in the map.  And while I have a friend helping me develop some customized pins, I like the look and feel of the Google ones and still prefer them. Will I do more KML work in the future?  Probably.  It was such a snap to do and the outcome was so rewarding I think I'll definitely employ this somewhere in the future.  For now it was a project well done and an interesting lesson in XML.