I was very excited to get this project done. I am a foodie at heart and love writing about food, so this project was perfect for me to express that love. Here’s the link.
Of course, I most enjoyed writing the article and talking to people about their favorite San Marcos restaurants (something I like to talk to random people about anyway), but it was interesting to see the data perspective of the local restaurants.
I expected an abundance of Mexican restaurants, but I think it’s always a little more jarring to see the numbers: 30 Mexican restraurants, 1 Italian. The rest had more reasonable numbers, with the possible exception of Indian food, which is nowhere to be found in San Marcos.
Something I wanted to highlight is the absence of many healthy local restaurants. I labeled a few that I know of for sure (and I’ve been to most everywhere here), but the variety just isn’t there. Most of the healthy options are sushi or more upscale American restaurants. There are very few on-the-go healthy options.
For my data, I used import.io to scrape Yelp for San Marcos restaurants. I took out the non-local chain restaurants (and kept the Austin chains like Torchy’s and Thundercloud – because really – they’re close to home), took out extraneous entries that were either duplicated or an old, no-longer-existing restaurant; and had to go in and add the “healthy,” “good for kids,” and “outdoor seating fields” myself.
I also had to go in and change the food type on many of them so I had fewer variables. I put Asian food together (because much of it is “Asian fusion” anyway, it’s easier to define it this way). I also put a lot of different foods under “American” food because it didn’t really have a defined food type. We’ll assume since we’re in America, we can call these places American foods.
I originally had five dropdowns to generate my answers – and all of them had to have a choice selected in order for it to produce the answers. Cindy was able to figure out how to generate results without every dropdown selection – so users can just choose one, or several. I’m really happy with the way this turned out, because it makes this site much more user friendly.