The county, as files
Everything on this site starts from files: what the county mapped, and what the ground looks like from the air.
Taxr, already running
None of this was gathered for the site. Taxr already had McCracken County: both parcel snapshots, the sales and deeds behind Glass rain, and a data team that turns raw county files into packs a page can read. Every pane links to a Taxr parcel page that was already live. That head start is most of why a front page took hours instead of months.
What came, and the rules
The county’s parcel map arrived as two full snapshots, February and September 2026: shapes in Kentucky’s state-plane feet, plus a handful of plain text tables. There was no family tree linking a parcel to the ones it was split into, so splits and merges had to be matched by how their shapes overlap.
The rules for anything public were set before the first picture:
- A parcel’s number, its site address, its class and its shape may show.
- No names: not owners, not buyers or sellers, not mailing addresses. The code that reads the files refuses those fields outright.
- Raw files never sit in a folder that ships. Small packers read them and write out only what the pages need.
Sale prices were an open question at first. Later the call was made that they’re public record, which is what lets Glass rain add up how the year’s sales moved.
The terrain pack
The terrain team flew in the ground itself: three LiDAR surveys, from 2013–18, 2020–21 and February 2026, laid on the parcels’ own grid. Seven gigabytes of it.
this is a lot of effort for a cue surface for effects. i hope its worth it
Sep 29, 17:24
The first look
So before building anything on it, we drew the real county once: all 35,194 parcels as hairlines over the 2026 bare earth, with a slow tour from the county down into downtown. Four questions went with it, and the answers came back in one message:
- Does relief make it more beautiful? “at county size the terrain feels like land.”
- Is a low-detail ground enough? The 1 MB version against the 38 MB one: “barely tell.” So only the small one ships.
- Is the change between flights interesting? “there’s a pattern of interest.”
- Where do parcels look best? Downtown and at city level, and not bad across the county, because of the terrain.
That gave us the rule everything since has followed: terrain carries the county, parcels carry the town.
Idea 20: the ground moves
The pattern of interest became its own piece. The county eases between the three flights, with ground that was raised in gold and ground that was dug away in blue. The floodwater of March 2020 showed up in the data as a sheet of lowered ground, so it’s drawn as rippling water instead. Each piece got its own page from then on.
almost every scene is good. what next
Sep 29, 18:16
The plotter
The second piece was the county as an engraved plat map: hachures for slope, ruled lines for water, and parcels inked outward from downtown and hatched by class: 26,048 residential, 2,451 mobile home, 2,167 farm, 2,137 commercial, 1,053 public and 585 industrial. It prints up to 8,192 pixels wide.
February meets September
When the earlier snapshot arrived, the comparison found 228 changes of shape: 101 adjusted, 54 split, 43 combined, 17 replatted, 6 renumbered, 6 created and 1 retired. The counts of parcels gone and new matched the data team’s own exactly. And about 1,750 parcels had a new deed. Those would become the coloured glass of Glass rain.
- The data format, and the rules for anything public.
- The terrain pack: seven gigabytes, three flights.
- The first look: hairline parcels over bare earth.
- “At county size the terrain feels like land.”
- Idea 20, the ground moves.
- The plotter, and the work goes into a repository.
- February’s snapshot: 228 changes of shape.