We’re really excited to announce a new feature on the site: scanner entries. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I finally buckled down and built it over the weekend.

Up until now the daily scanner reports have just been big blog posts: a bunch of text with addresses and incidents, but there was no way to map them or correlate them to similar events over time.

But as of this morning, every item in a scanner report is a unique entry with its own location on the map and its own tags related to what kind of event it was.

The first change you’ll see is on the scanner reports themselves. There’s now a map on each one that shows every event that has an address:
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2008/05/13/cd-scanner-5-13

In addition, common crimes like Burglary are linked in the titles of the entries, so you can go back and see all similar events that have happened previously. For example, here’s a list of all assaults:
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/liveblogentries?tag=Assault

Each event also has its own unique URL, so you can copy it and send it in emails or put it in your own blog posts. Just right click on the time for the entry to you want to link to, and choose “Copy Link” or the similar choice in your browser.

You can also get an RSS feed of all the individual scanner events. (don’t understand what RSS is? Check out CD alum Lee’s great video that explains it all). Just subscribe to the feed on the list page:
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/liveblogentries

And don’t miss the big map with all the scanner entries plotted on it:
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/liveblogentries/map

This is very new beta-level code, so let us know if you find any problems or if there’s something you’d like to see changed.

And I know there’s some frustration out there that the site has been so crime-heavy lately. I’ll be honest: bad news drops in our laps, but good news takes a lot of work to root it out and tell the story. And we’ve been really busy with other projects, limiting the time we focus on those more time-consuming topics. So if you have good news to tell, become a member of the site and tell it yourself. Or drop us a line and we’ll try to cover it. But remember, this is a community site, so you always have a voice. All it takes is participation to make your own mark.