>Impressive concept!
>
>One thought on the generation of the real-time maps:
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>As others have remarked, it takes some time for the crime map to show up. On my system (FireFox) I had to click past a couple of "Script appears to be busy ..." dialogs before the chosen map eventually appeared.
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>Hopefully you aren't generating this map on the fly for each hit, because I don't think that's necessary. The maps are always the same, until a new report comes in. You could basically regenerate static pages (e.g. with a background server process) each time a report is received. In fact, you'd only have to regenerate the ones that have changed, not all of them will change for a given new crime report.
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>If your current engine *is* generating maps on the fly, that is of course perfect to support ad-hoc queries, so definitely don't delete that function < g >

These are static pages that get recreated every 15 minutes, even thought the meta-refresh tags update the pages every 10.

>
>UPDATE: clicking on the "Simple Assaults" link (64 reports) basically crashed FireFox - 3 "busy scripts" messages, then CPU pinned indefinitely at 100%.
>

It's a performance issue with firefox. I've done some preliminary research on the issue and google knows about it, but I haven't found any fixes other than preloading the images, which I am trying.

>A couple of appearance quibbles:
>- you might want to clean up the artwork (e.g. dept. seal), it should be optimized for on-screen web page resolution, and in some places it's oval instead of round

I called myself fixing that. I'll run fireworks on the images and have it optimize also.

>- I'd consider a sans-serif font instead Times (New) Roman. You might want to rationalize any style sheet(s) you may be using

Good point.

Thanks for the criticism?<g>