You don’t call, you don’t write …

Nothing new in six months? Seriously?

Well, yes, and we’re sorry about that. But stay tuned in the next few weeks for exciting news about what we’ve been up to all that time.

Just added: 2007-2008 FCAT results and school grades, 2008-2009 attendance zone maps

Just added to the 29 Palm Beach County public school pages included in the current version of Backyard Post: FCAT results and school grades for 2007-2008 and attendance zone maps for 2008-2009. Why only those 29 schools? Because we’re still in the testing and development phase. Among other things, that means our coverage is limited to incorporated West Palm Beach. Our 29 current schools either draw students from West Palm Beach or are magnet schools physically situated in the city. We have all the same data for the other 134 traditional public schools that the Palm Beach County school district will open this fall, but it’s going to be awhile before we switch them on, so to speak.

One other change so seemingly minor and incredibly microscopic that I’m including it here merely as a test of your dedication to following every little move made by the Backyard Post team: We finally started labeling school years with both calendar years that the school year spans instead of only the calendar year in which the school year began.

So that was pretty clear, right?

We used to label school years like this: 2007. Now we label it like this: 07-08. The old way confused everyone and even everything (plants, staplers and other inanimate objects) who/that ever saw it, including ourselves. Let’s just forget it ever happened, shall we? Seriously, just drop it already.

107 days of Backyard Post browser and operating system stats, for no particular reason

You know what we like here at Backyard Post headquarters? Stats. Stats and the FAIL Blog. And tea. Stats, the FAIL Blog and tea. So, for no particular reason, here is a chart showing which browsers were used by visitors to Backyard Post on each of the 107 days from April 1 to July 16:

The decline in Firefox’s percentage is probably due to the increasing number of more mainstream visitors arriving via search engines, as opposed to the early and nerdy crowd that swung by to leer at our sweet data and maps. Remember, we’re still very much in the no-local-promotion, behind-the-scenes development and testing phase, so almost everyone hitting the site today is a random Googler. That also explains this chart of operating system share during the same period:

Interested in the Internet Explorer version breakdown over the 107-day period? Lucky you:

And the Firefox version breakdown? Can you believe your luck:

Windows version detail? Coming right up:

We love it when a plan comes together

Remember how we said two weeks ago that Backyard Post had a minor bug in Firefox 3? How it wasn’t rendering parcels on our real estate maps in the green-yellow-red color scale we use to very generally represent sale prices? Well, never mind all that now. After hours of backbreaking work and just generally tireless mental and physical exertion, our parcels are now properly shaded in Firefox 3, and all is right and just in the world. It was a tough fight, but we just kept our heads down and managed to pull through.

OK, that’s not strictly true. What actually happened was this: We didn’t do anything and the maps just started working. As Hannibal would no doubt say in this situation, we love it when a cross-browser compatibility plan comes together.

A quick note about Firefox 3

The last time we wrote about browser compatibility it was to point out that we do not support Internet Explorer 6. That hasn’t changed, and we’re both happy and discouraged to report that since April 1, Internet Explorer 6 has accounted for 20.1 percent of visits to Backyard Post. Happy because that’s a significantly lower percentage than at The Palm Beach Post’s main site, discouraged because it’s Internet Explorer 6. It was released in 2001, people! Come on! Seriously!

At the opposite end of the browser spectrum you have Firefox 3, which was just released today. As is the case with Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3, Backyard Post looks fine in Firefox 3. The only difference between it and the previous version of Firefox is that it’s not rendering parcels on our real estate maps in the green-yellow-red color scale we use to very generally represent sale prices. Here’s what you’ll see in Firefox 3:

We have the same glitch with Safari 3. (But only 4.8 percent of you are using that browser.) Here’s how it looks in Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, which is the way we intended it:

We’ll get to all the browser-specific bugs and glitches eventually, promise. Even IE 6. Maybe. The bottom line is that Backyard Post remains very much in a testing phase. We’re just doing our sausage-making, as they say, out here in the semi-open where anyone can watch. So feel free to use any modern browser you choose, and let us know if you notice anything funky.

Google Maps road map tiles problem fixed

Visitors in the past few days have no doubt noticed that our Google Maps windows weren’t loading road map tiles. They would have seen something like this:

Turns out we simply weren’t keeping a particular JavaScript file up to date, and now that that’s sorted out the road tiles are back and our maps are looking as swell as ever:

Backyard Post now WAY cat picture-ier than before

We took the site down for maintenance a few hours yesterday (intentionally, this time), which finally gave us the opportunity to feature an amusing cat picture on Backyard Post. This brought us inexplicable joy. Check out more pictures of Pokeweed the cat at Flickr.

That is all.

This post has very little to do with Backyard Post, actually

It’s the end of another week, summer, or at least summer weather, is here, hurricane season is just a few hours away, and it appears everyone here at Backyard Post headquarters has gone a bit loopy. Allow us to share with you, then, two things we learned today.

1. It is better to be the snow leopard than the mountain goat
We performed a careful study of the following video this afternoon, and the evidence for our conclusion appears to be overwhelming.

2. Matt thinks the RiverWalk neighborhood in West Palm Beach looks like rough endoplasmic reticulum
But bear in mind that this is coming from a man who stares at code all day, like he’s that guy in The Matrix, or something. You know, that one guy?

If a server fails to reboot in a forest …

Pretty much according to plan, we’re still serving very low-volume traffic at Backyard Post. The little guy’s still in his wee beta release onesie, after all, so we’re not quite ready to start handling a wider audience. Which is why only an incredibly small number of people probably even noticed that, very much not according to plan, the site was down for 11 hours yesterday. An odd confluence of events was behind both the original problem and its extended duration. Lessons learned.

Mainly, we tried to view this for what it was: An excellent opportunity to begin creating our own “sorry we screwed up the site but maybe you’ll get a kick out of this witty lolcat we made” pictures. Now that’s an exciting development.

Neighborhood mapping help from abroad

We draw a lot of neighborhood boundaries here at Backyard Post HQ. “Only” 211 neighborhoods are active at the moment because we’re limiting our coverage to the city of West Palm Beach during our semi-public testing phase, but there are thousands more on the way. Clearly, we’re always looking for help when it comes to drawing neighborhood maps and sorting out neighborhood names.

Massive props, then, to former Palm Beach Post colleague, honorary Backyard Post senior South American polo and bus travel correspondent, and true son of Palm Beach County Andrew Marra. Despite being 4,500 miles away in Argentina, Andrew recently passed along the details on his very own boyhood neighborhood. (As for what he’s doing 4,500 miles away in Argentina, no one knows.)

So, Gardenia Gardens residents, someday in the not-too-distant future, when we flick the switch and activate your neighborhood’s mini-site, thank Andrew for helping us get it right. (And definitely blame him if we get it wrong.) Without his long-distance contribution, your lovely community would have been known merely as Palm Beach Gardens Plat 6.

If you have information on a neighborhood in Palm Beach, Martin, or St. Lucie counties down here in southeast Florida, we’d love it if you would get in touch and share.