For a few minor updates, I have created a new Twitter/X account to advertise Crime De-Coder. I do not know if there is some setting that people ignore all unverified accounts, but would appreciate the follow and reshare if you are still on the platform.

I also have an account on LinkedIn, and sometimes comment on the Crime Analysis Reddit.

I try to share cool data visualizations and technical posts. I know LinkedIn in particular can be quite vapid self-help guru type advice, which I avoid. I know being more technical limits the audience but that is ok. So appreciate the follow if you are on those platforms and resharing the work.

Ebooks vs Paperbacks

Part of the reason to start X account back up is to just try more advertising. I have sold not quite 80 to date (including pre-sales). My baseline goal was 100.

For the not pre-sales, I have sold 35% ebooks and 65% paperbacks. So spending some time to distribute your book paperback seems to me to be worth it.

Again feel like most academics who publish technical books self-publishing is a very good idea. So read the above linked post about some of the logistics of self-publishing.

Aoristic analysis in python

On the CRIME De-Coder blog, check out my post on Aoristic analysis. It has links to python code on github for those who just want the end result. It has several methods though to do hour of day and hour by day of week breakdowns. With the ability to do it by categories in data. And post hoc generate a few graphs. I like the line graphs the best:

But the more common heatmap I can understand why people like it

Website Design

I have a few minor website design updates. The homepage is more svelte. Wife suggested that it should be easier to see what I do right when you are on homepage, so put the jumbotron box at the bottom and the services tiles (with no pictures) at the top.

It does not look bad on mobile either (I only recently figured out that in Chrome’s DevTools they have a button to do turn on mobile view, very helpful!)

Final part is that I made a footer for my pages:

I am not real happy with this. One of the things you notice when you start doing web-design is everyone’s web-page looks the same. There are some basic templates for WordPress or Wix (and probably other CMS generators). Here is Supabases’s footer for example:

And now that I have shown you, you will see quite a few websites have that design. So I did the svg links to social media, but I may change that. (And go with no footer again, there is not a real obvious need for it.) So open to suggestions!

In intentionally made many of the decisions for the way the Crime De-Coder site looks not only to make it usable but to make it at least somewhat different. Avoid super long scrolls, sticky header (that still works quite well on phones). The header is quite dense with many sub-pages (I like it though).

I think alot of public sector agencies that are doing data dashboards now do not look very nice. Many are just iframed Tableau dashboards. If you want help with those data visualizations embedded in a more organic way in your site, that is something Crime De-Coder can help with.