Work on my pub site is coming along faster than I had expected, slowed down only by my need to concentrate on my Open University course. So far I have all the data required to add a handful of pubs, though I still need to buy a new digital camera so that I can go out and take photos of them for uploading.
At the moment I’m writing a simple scraper to pull in the station name, code and latitude/longitude from Wikipedia for all current railway stations in the UK, plus the same data for London Underground and Metrolink stations. Once this is done, and I’ve figured out how to do spatial queries in MySQL (e.g. return all recorded items within a given radius of a specified point), I’ll be able to show the nearest stations to pubs and vice versa. I hope this will be useful, but if not it’s provided me with a refresher of how to parse text and use regular expressions in Perl. The same code will be put to use for creating a database of UK counties and cities, so finding all pubs in Manchester or Lancashire will be a doddle.
I’m aiming to launch the site on 6 April, for no other reason than it’s a close deadline to aim for and I’ll remember because it’s the start of the financial year.
Thats great news!!
I have code to do the radius bit.
Code which you can share? 🙂 Although I imagine someone has probably done the legwork and made a Perl module too.