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Inside blogdowntown

Stories about blogdowntown itself.

Housekeeping Updates: Most Viewed Stories and Sidebar Reorganization

By Eric Richardson — August 30, 2009

blogdowntown

The blogdowntown sidebar got a minor facelift this evening, just a little something to make sure it stays useful. Wrapped in with some minor tweaks is one feature that should prove interesting, though: a view of what stories get the most views here on the site. — Continued Inside...

Inside the blogdowntown Newsroom

By Eric Richardson — August 24, 2009
6 Comments

|Photo Gallery| A botched code upgrade left blogdowntown a bit unstable this morning, causing a pair of brief outages and some issues with commenting. While all that is long fixed now, I thought I would use the occasion to offer a little glimpse into the application code that powers blogdowntown and the newsroom interface we use to publish stories.

blogdowntown's Short Move (Updates)

By Eric Richardson — June 26, 2009
5 Comments

blogdowntown took a short move Thursday evening, traveling from the Historic Core to the Financial District and its new home at 600 W. 7th street.

New Features: Readers' Photos

By Eric Richardson — August 13, 2008

I teased on Sunday that there were a few new features in the works, and tonight I get the chance to let you help a fun one: Readers' Photos. A lot of you take great photos of Downtown, and we'd like to see some of them here on the site.

Looking Back on a Design Evolution

By Eric Richardson — August 10, 2008
4 Comments

|Photo Gallery| Every once in a while I like to give a little glimpse behind the scenes of blogdowntown. Today I happened across a folder of design mockups I had created in the process of putting together the new design we launched on April 1st of this year. This sequence of four images gives a fair representation of how the site's look developed in the months preceding the...

Thanks for Talking

By Eric Richardson — June 14, 2008
5 Comments

Recently I wrote that Friday was a slow day for comments. Well, yesterday you all blew that idea out of the water. Friday, June 13th, had the most comments of any day in blogdowntown history.

Patterns, Numbers and Comments

By Eric Richardson — June 03, 2008

|Photo Gallery| This may fall clearly into the category of lies and statistics, but tonight I decided to run some numbers to see if a hunch I had would hold true. My question: Are comments really a lot lighter of Fridays than on other weekdays?

Looking at blogdowntown Stories from Above

By Eric Richardson — May 29, 2008
1 Comment

Just a bit of a fun image this evening. What you're looking at is a view of all blogdowntown stories from April - May, 2008, that were about a location. The image was taken from a Google Maps overlay of blogdowntown data. I'm rather impressed with the distribution of coverage. We're a little Historic Core-heavy and a bit South Park-poor, but on the whole...

No Joking: Welcome to blogdowntown

By Eric Richardson — April 01, 2008 — 19 Comments

While the calendar may say April 1st, I'll gladly assure you that this isn't a joke. After months of work, the all-singing, all-dancing, new blogdowntown is ready for its public debut.

First off, yes, it is quite different.

That out of the way, I'm really excited to get to share a project that's taken large chunks of my time ever since last fall. The purpose of blogdowntown is to present information that helps create a community conversation about Downtown, and I think this code presents a framework that'll help us in our pursuit of what that goal actually means. — Continued Inside...