Hi everyone!

It’s funny how people pick up upon random things you do. I hadthe idea for the mashup while Robin and I were trying to figure outwhere to eat on Friday night. I had what you see up on Sunday, and Ihaven’t touched it since. It was more of a casual weekend projectdoing tooling around with google maps and Ajax, so it’s prettyamazing that other people are finding out about it!

Recap:

• Saturday, Sunday: Geeking out. Toss it up on a server.
• Monday (9th): IM dozen people to show off and fish forcomplements. Fire off an email to menupages. Post to blog.
  • Robin: “You never proof read anything, do you? Don’t leaveit like that. People are going to think you are an illiteratemoron.”
  • Me: “Whatever. No one’s going to see it.”
  
  


• Friday: Notice that my server is busy. What the… Poke through access.log and see that Google Maps Mania somehow finds it – the day that they their interview on NPR wasbroadcast. Yee-haw! Curious as to how they found me, I ask how they did it and they say “Similar to technorati - it’s my trade secret.”
  
  So mysterious.


• Monday (16th): Server dies for 4 days for reasons unexplained.
  
  Very annoying, though mostly because it hosts my mail.
• Saturday, Sunday, Monday: Spend weekend packing, moving out of myapartment, being tired.
• Get email from CEO of menupages saying that I am the man, andthat Eater and Grid Skipper picked it up.
• Today: Gothamist links.

The internet. Who knew?

This was a casual throw-away project for me, (quote Gridskipper: “A bit kludgy and slow”), but I’m basically happily unemployed andthis is fun to play with so what else do you think I should do withit? I was thinking about selling it to menupages so I could, youknow, finance that wine bar we’ve been thinking about starting. Itmight be nice to pull in different data sources – something thatcovers Brooklyn, perhaps? Who knows. Feel free to drop me a linewith any questions/suggestions.

Google Maps + Menupages.com mash-up

I live in New York City and I eat out a lot. I end up going to the same places a lot of the time, places in familar haunts or places I hear about from other people. But it often happens that I’m looking for something in a neiborhood and there’s no good way of doing proximity exploring. I’m always scrolling through citysearch for example trying to find a sushi-no-maybe-indian place in some neiborhood I’m not familiar with. So I decided to take one of my favorite sites, menupages.com, which has the menus of all these places online, and plug it into google maps.

Now at its new home:

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/map