Late last week the City posted new inspections reports, ending the 4 1/2 month long inspection drought. And the City has launched a new search interface to boot. While only year 2006 reports are in their new front-end, it appears to be much more complete than the previous reports posted. For example, in May 2005 605 reports were posted. The new system posted 1,120 reports for May 2006.

I’ve also seen establishments that had not been updated in YEARS finally have a report show up. My standing example is Uncle Julio’s on Lemmon Ave. It did not have a report published between December 2003 and February 2006. There is now a report for March 2006.

The City’s new publishing system appears to have very little lag time between when an establishment is inspected and when it can be found in their search page.

I will be importing new reports from the City’s database once a week. Why not more frequently? OK, put your geek hat on. The City’s database is not normalized around unique establishment names and addresses. So CICI’S PIZZA can appear as CICI’S PIZZA #41 one period and CICI’S PIZZA RESTAURANT the next. And in the past the addresses could even vary.

While I have some snazzy tools to manage this process — here is a screenshot — I can’t safely automate this step. But this work — and it was a huge amount of work when I did the first data import/merge in 2005 — is why you can view and chart all inspections for a given establishment.

Oh, and for any programmers out there. Yes, I do keep track of previous versions of an establishment name and even global mappings and automatically pick these up. But you’d be surprised at how frequently the spelling and wording changes from one inspection to the next! :-(

Please contact me if you see any errors or omissions! Thanks. -Mike

I fixed a few bugs tonight:

• Search near location would sometimes give an error along the lines of "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". I believe I have fixed this, but won’t be sure until I monitor the usage for a few days.
• The "Score to Show" buttons on the map page were broken during a recent software change. If you clicked "Avg," "Worst," or "Best" the map would get all foobar. Fixed. BTW, if you have never clicked the "Worst" button, give it a try and scroll around your neighborhood.
• On Mac Safari there was some very ugly extra whitespace between the page header and menu. This has been removed.

Those are all the bugs I am aware of. If you ever see any problems or have suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

UPDATE #1: so far so good on the first bug mentioned above. Yippee!

UPDATE #2: I just fixed a bug unrelated to above, that probably affected a very, very small number of users. If you have set your browser/robot to not pass a User-Agent header, when you requested a page from foodinspect.com your connection would timeout. Fixed and unintentional.

Yesterday I spoke with a supervisor from the Dallas Food Protection and Education department about the lack of new reports on the City of Dallas website. As of this writing, no new inspection reports have been posted for approximately two months. The supervisor said they are in the middle of an IT modification and expect to get caught up within the next 30 days.

The site was featured in a report on KXAS NBC Channel 5’s news and the shared hosting server we use was not designed to handle the sudden spike in traffic. My apologies. -Mike

In case anyone is wondering why there have been no data updates, the city has not published any new inspection reports in over a month.

We have changed the letter grade scores to better align with the City of Dallas score descriptions. The new score breakdown follows:

Our about page also lists these new score ranges.

We had originally mapped 70-79 to D. This was confusing, because Very Good and Good mapped into A, B, and C. We hope this new system is less confusing. Please contact us via the comments for this blog entry or by e-mail if you have any questions or comments.

We’ve also added notes in each establishment’s detail page when an inspection requires re-inspection (C, D, or F). Here is an example of this.

The "Browse by Score" page has been removed because this functionality is also available in the "Advanced Search" page, and in fact offers more functionality since you can combine score-based searches with name and geographical searches. Here is an example that shows all establishments whose latest score was C or lower within a 2.5 mile radius of McKinney & Lemmon Avenues.

Food scores for January 1st through the 15th 2006 have been imported. These scores will show up in all reports. You can also run a search limited to establishments that were inspected during this period.

On Sunday NBC Dateline had a report about best and worst supermarkets according to their health inspection scores. The methodology seems very thorough. Note that except for SUPER MERCADO, most Dallas supermarket chains have fairly similar average scores. Where they tend to differ are those chains that have had some serious problems at one or more location in their history. You can see our summary here.

We’ve seen some errors when you use the "Search Near an Address" features. You may get an error about "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."We have not been able to track down the bug yet. We restarted the Web service as a temporary fix but it may crop up again until we nail this down. Apologies.

UPDATE: The bug may have to do with a recent DB update. We have not seen this since the restart and could not replicate the bug on our development server. We will keep an eye on this. The bug only affected about 5 users during a 30 minute period this morning.

Food scores for the entire month of December 2005 have been imported. These scores will show up in all reports. You can also run a search limited to establishments that were inspected during this period.