Credit Card Map

As I was looking through my credit card statements the other day and wincing over the cost of the road trip, I realized that you could sort of recreate my path across the country by stitching together the cities listed for the various charges. And so, I present to you the official Road Trip Credit Card Map:

I whipped up a few Ruby scripts (source here) to scrape the transactions from the HTML (oddly, the more easily parseable export formats offered by Citi and Chase such as CSV don’t provide the city and state information), looked up with lat, lng coordinates with the Google Maps geocoder, and then dumped the whole mess to an XML file that is then read in by the Google Maps javascript API.

One problem with this is that sometimes the charge date doesn’t match the actual date of purchase so it looks like there is some backtracking that didn’t occur. Also, the city and state listed for the transaction doesn’t always match the place where I made the charge. And finally, some of the city names are mangled and unrecognized by the geocoder. These need to be corrected by hand. Still, I think it is a fairly accurate representation.

I’ve only tested it on IE7 and Firefox2 so your mileage may vary depending on your browser of choice. Lemme know if it doesn’t work. And yes, I did eat at an Applebee’s once. /me hangs head in shame.