Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Sydney International Food Festival Maps

Every year, Sydney has this awesome International Food Festival filled with food events and deals on meals at local restaurants. In particular, they have this "Lets do lunch" deal where you can get nice lunchtime meals at fancy restaurants for $35, and I usually like to get some colleagues together to hit up some of the restaurants. Unfortunately, they never have a map visualizing the locations of all the restaurants, and it's hard to find the places near my work.

So, every year, I make a map of the restaurants. Per request of @MorselsMusings, I've also made maps of the Cocktails, High Tea and Sugar Hit deals. The deals last until the end of October, so check them out now while you have time!

If you're a developer and wondering how I whipped these together, here's the short version: 1) I used Dapper to get a CSV of the name, description, and link from the main page, 2) I converted those into a Google spreadsheet and used the importXML function to get the address from the individual restaurant page, 3) I published the sheets and got the latitude/longitude coordinates using my Spreadsheets Geocoding tool, 4) I made the maps using my Spreadsheets Maps API wizard. It is a bit of a process, but as I spend half my life doing this sort of thing, it doesn't actually take very long (< hour).

Happy fooding!

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