The Official Backyard Post Blog

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.

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.

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

It’s true, we’re massive serif fans here at Backyard Post headquarters. What’s more, we like our type BIG, big and easy to read. It’s remarkable how little care so many otherwise beautifully crafted web sites dedicate to text. Just the other day I ran across a blog post on a design firm’s site, of all places, that was displayed in tiny white text on a bright red background, which really was just stupidly difficult to read. Like staring at the sun. Mental.

Today, for your reading pleasure, we ever so slightly bumped up the text size on our news story pages. (Example here.) Dramatic? No. Awesome? Hopefully. What do you, several readers, think?

Backyard Post text:

Normal text:

(Not that we’re hatin’ on all you big, beautiful sans-serif fonts. I, for example, happen to be ever so slightly nutty for futura. No typeface discrimination is tolerated at Backyard Post HQ.)

(Maybe these “ier” post titles aren’t going to work out over the long term, after all. Should it be real estatier? Real estateier? Sadly the AP Stylebook has nothing to say on the issue, as it generally deals with actual words, proper grammar, etc., and as a result has understandably little guidance for self-indulgent jerks prone to making up words for their own amusement. Or should I say “amusementiness?”)

Moving on. The main Backyard Post real estate page is now more of a “home” page for our sweet sales database, which covers 14 years of residential transactions in Palm Beach County and is updated five days a week. Previously, we simply had a map and list of all our current neighborhoods, which you can still see here, and you could only see our real estate data at the individual neighborhood level.

The new page includes a basic chart of median sales prices by housing type, a rundown of all sales from the past 30 days and a search box to replace the old neighborhood list. Like the rest of the site, we’re currently limiting the data to transactions in the city of West Palm Beach. Nothing mind-blowing yet, but this sets the stage for all sorts of data access and visualization fun we plan to introduce this summer as we continue working toward a proper, public launch.

Stay tuned, early adopters/incredibly random Google-searchers.

After weeks of careful research, the Backyard Post team has determined that the ability to easily “search” a “web site” is a key expectation of many 21st-century hipsters such as yourself. As a result, we just added site-wide search that is much faster, more robust and way more visible than our first attempt. This will search stories, neighborhoods, parks, schools and libraries. The story search uses a custom weighting system to determine which stories are the most relevant to your search.

Why not take it out for a spin? Like the rest of Backyard Post, this search functionality is still in the testing phase, so please get in touch with us if you find any bugs, or even if you just want to say hello. (We do get lonely sometimes, you know. Just sitting around here with nothing but our custom weighting system and spectacular mustaches to keep us company all day.)