Behind the scenes at Everyblock.com

• Adrian Holovoty

Model designs

• Looks straight-forward
• But can’t do models per type

• So perhaps a bit of abstraction?

  • Entry Attribute Value method?

    • Needs multiple joins

  • Bitmap method uses limited columns

    • varchar01, bool01
    • Needs an in-database schema
    • Sorting can be an issue. Everyblock wrote a custom sort method

• GeoDjango lets you do geographic queries against your models

• Look up select_template method in Django

Data Scraping

• Regex for addresses
• http://code.google.com/p/templatemaker/ (built off C + python)
• Getting public info can be hard

IMPORTANT

• June 30th of 2009 Everyblock gets open sourced!