Apartment hunting, aka fun with Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps March 4
So, I’m looking for a new place to live. My current place is ok, other than the fact that I have to wear earplugs in order not to be woken up by the guy upstairs talking on the phone or walking around, due to extremely thin floors.
The process of looking for a new place usually means lots of saved searches on craigslist with are imported as rss feeds into google reader. However, this time around, I thought I’d get fancy, and see what I could with Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps. Here’s the fruit of my labors: Scotty’s Custom Apartment Search
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It involves a couple pipes:
- Housing search with radius which is made up of
- Craigslist housing and
- Distance between two addresses
The last of these uses the new Fetch Page module in Pipes to fetch maps.google.com driving directions, extracting the driving distance. Thus, it’s not actually an “as the crow flies” radius - it’s something even better: it’s a driving distance radius. It would be just as easy to do driving time as well, which would be interesting.
I integrated the pipe with maps using the GeoXml rss overlay api for maps.
Overall, I’m really impressed impressed with Pipes. Above all else, it’s a really fun system to use. My only frustration is that it’s a bit too simple in places. For instance, it only allows simple math, which prevented me from calculating “as the crow flies” distance between two points, due to a lack of trig functions.