Movies in the Park Locator

Want to know where the closest Movie in the Park is for any given day? Perhaps this Movies in the Park locator will be useful! (Or, barring useful, at least functional!)

When I started playing around with creating Google calendars for free events in Chicago, I realized that the Movies in the Park event calendar wasn’t as useful as I wanted it to be.

Since there can be multiple screenings on a given day, and those screenings are all over the city, the calendar entry alone didn’t tell me at a glance if I should plan on seeing the film.  Let’s be honest; I’m only going to go to a Movie in the Park showing if it’s in a convenient location for me.

I’d seen a cool timeline mashup a while back, so the first thing I tried was a Google Maps/SIMILE timeline mashup.  Although I was pleased that I got it to work successfully and I was glad to learn that Google Spreadsheets has a lat/long lookup function and that it’s possible to convert the spreadsheet into a JSON file for a map like this, it wasn’t really the right format for the data.

My next project  included a program to scrape and reformat the Movies in the Park schedule from the Chicago Park District, as well as the creation of a Movies in the Park locator.  It’s still not perfect, but you can see where the movies are being shown across the city for any given date.

Since there are so few movies being shown on any date, I might take out the ZIP Code input all together and use mapstraction’s center and zoom instead.  There are a ton of other features that could be added, but for now I’m quite pleased with myself, and I think I did a pretty good job for a non-developer.