My apologies for the long delay since last writing. I am just writing now to let you know that I have made some updates to the site code. There were previously some errors in certain situations. Most notably, when tracts had a straight north-south line, in a small percentage of cases, the acreages could be computed wrongly (and would usually end up smaller than they should have been). Also, I have made some refinements to the way that areas are computed in general, although these should not be noticable in most cases, as the refinements only apply to very very small areas (ten-thousandths of an acre or less).
As always, please feel free to let me know if you come across a plot where the acreage is obviously wrong. Please only do this if you are sure that the plot is otherwise well-formed, i.e. it closes fairly cleanly and no errors are shown. If you do come across this, please leave a comment on the blog.
I am getting “back into the swing of things” after a hiatus from programming. I must admit that I had a bit of a mental block to getting the above-mentioned errors fixed, as they meant a re-writing of a large portion of the site’s most basic programming. However, now that that’s done, I am free to move towards larger changes. In particular, I want to get the site to a revenue-generating state by the end of the year for tax purposes. I have a game-plan in mind for how to implement arcs, which will only be available in the paid version. Also, paid users will be able to save any plot and come back to it at a later time. Joining of multiple plots will also be easy and fast (although I have noticed that some people have figured out a way to do this with the existing site by careful manipulation of the deed calls). Of course paid users will also be able to resize the plat size as large as I can practically make them (at least big enough to fill an 8×11 sheet of paper).
From time to time, I browse the submitted plots (I have all of them saved) and I am frequently amazed by some of the huuuuge plots you guys are making! Not necessarily huge in terms of acreage, but huge in terms of having many calls which create very interesting-looking tracts. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.
This tract is 264 acres in area and has a perimeter of over 20,000 linear feet. And it closes to within 28 feet! Nice work! I like the little 30-foot square chunk out of the northmost northeast corner. I think I will make a weekly thing out of this, posting a new and interesting tract every week. Privacy should not be a concern, as everything is completely anonymous, and of course nobody knows where a given tract is actually located in the country, or even in the world. Yes, we even have some users from the UK and a few other locations outside the United States that apparently use metes and bounds descriptions.
In fact, I will give some site statistics as well, as it’s kind of a fun thing and I’m happy with the site’s growth so far. As of today, there have been over 7,000 unique users of the site (people who have come to the site and submitted a plot at least once). You have submitted just over 92,000 plots since the site opened in February of 2007. The current rate is approximately 400 users per month and 3000-4000 plots per month. Almost 800 of you have signed up for update e-mails, of which I have not yet sent any. Based on a simplistic reading of these e-mail addresses, we have real estate agents, landmen, real estate developers, lawyers, and members of state and federal government agencies using the site. Pretty neat! I never thought the site would find such a wide range of uses.
Well, that wraps up this edition of the blog. I hope to make more regular posts in the future and have some definite progress on the paid site.
No Comments