isnoop.net blog

In order to help a convention get off the ground, I built a tool that scraped all of the prices for round trip flights from every American and Canadian airport to eleven major North American cities.

According to my Costimator, Washington DC is the cheapest major destination, and NYC’s LaGuardia airport is the cheapest origin airport in North America.

You can enter airport codes and view the average cost to major destinations along with the percent difference from the average cost.

I subscribe to several fast moving feeds. Most of the news in these feeds is of little interest to me, but I’ve remained subscribed just so I can catch the occasional gem.

This problem begged a simple solution, so I’ve created FeedSifter.com. It is a very easy to use service that allows you to monitor any RSS/RDF/Atom feed for multiple different groups of words. FeedSifter automatically determines what sort of feed you are filtering and gives you only the entries that you care about. You can generate as many filtered feeds as you’d like, and you can change your filter at any time by returning to the site.

For example, say you want to filter the FatWallet.com Hot Deals feed for free items, NewEgg.com deals, and drives of all sorts (USB, harddrives, etc). You could use a filter like the following:


Free
NewEgg
GB,drive

Once entered, you are provided with a filtered feed URL and you’re all set.

After watching a building burn across the water from my office today, I had the idea of applying the Seattle emergency response data to a map.

You can click on each of the datapoints for some interesting info on what’s going on at this very moment in the Emerald City. In later revisions, I’ll add auto-updating AJAX calls and fancy icons for different event types.

If you live in a major city with data like this, let me know the URL. I might be able to whip up something similar for you.