dev post-mortem: data.seattle.gov feed

[williampower]

Hey, all!

Wanted to talk about this during the event summary, but the network
issue held me up. I'm a dev & wanted to see how quickly I could "do
something" using the Socrata data source. In the 3 hours we had, I
came up with this: http://willpower.name/flex/SocrataView.html

It grabs data from http://data.seattle.gov/Community/Seattle-Communities-Online-Inventory/5ytf-wban,
displays a neighborhood selection box, then displays the neighborhood-
specific URLs once a neighborhood is clicked.

My initial goal was to display a google map with polygon overlays of
the neighborhoods for which there's data, then filter the URL list
based on which neighborhood was clicked. I ran out of time, but still
intend to add that feature.

That said, here's a quick retrospective: it was SUPER easy to get data
off data.seattle.gov. Period. I browsed collections until I found
something I wanted to use, poked around until I found the URL for
grabbing the JSON data, then popped that into a Flex app. The only
down side was that the objects I grabbed didn't have data field
labels, so I had to guess based on what I saw in the debug view. Chris
indicated there was an expansion planned for this feed, so I'm sure
they'll get it going soon enough.

Thanks, Socrata & data.seattle.gov. It was VERY easy to use your data
feed!