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.
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.
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?
(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.
Welcome to The Official Backyard Post Blog, where we'll bring you all the latest behind-the-scenes news about Backyard Post. Check back often for updates about the site, new product announcements and maybe, just maybe, the occasional cat picture.
