Shape Escape
Well it's been a while, so just a quick note: Since the last post, I started working full time for Google. And with that out of the way, here's a post on how and why I made shpescape.com , which lets you upload shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables . Why shpescape? Google Fusion tables makes it easy to import and visualize data from spreadsheets and KML, and while it has increasingly robust spatial support it does not currently let you upload shapefiles directly. And since shapefiles are still incredibly common in the wild, I thought I'd make a quick tool to let people upload shapefiles to Fusion Tables. Which platform? I thought I'd try Google App Engine to avoid any hosting costs (given this will likely not be an extremely popular website), but while there's a decent shapefile reader or two for python, there's not a lot of support for things like reprojecting and other geometry manipulation without additional c++ libraries that App Engine won't