I’ve created a new Facebook app which I call Anne Arundel County Police Brief Analyzer. I noticed my local police department had a Facebook page and that they posted their police briefs to this page. The briefs all followed the same format, so I decided to see if I could parse them to grab out some statistics.

The app is pretty simple, and right now all its doing is counting the number of times the various cities in the county are mentioned in the briefing sub-headings. Basically it answers the question: “Which cities show up in the police briefs the most?” This app would probably be more helpful with population data, however, it was mostly just done as an experiment, so I probably wont go any further with it. However, I figured I’d post it up since I found it kind of interesting.

The only hitch to creating the app was that you can only grab the 25 notes from Facebook per request, at least with their JavaScript SDK. To grab more notes, you have change the “offset” parameter (also see batch requests). Example:

FB.api("/aacopd/notes", {offset: 175, limit:25}, function(response) {
    console.dir(response.data);
});

patrickgillespie.com Update

I’ve updated the cloud code at patrickgillespie.com to now use a canvas element in browsers that support it. This leads to a much smoother appearance in Chrome and a slightly better appearance in FireFox. I tried using excanvas for the IE version, but it was too choppy for what I was doing, so the IE version still uses divs.