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Florida Home: The best local real estate site anywhere in the history of all things

And we have the giant banner to prove it. And the giant coffee pots. Tomorrow we introduce Florida Home to the local real estate community, with a public launch coming soon. Powered by the platform built for our old Backyard Post concept, built on a foundation of Real Neighborhoods™, and fueled by salsa and awesome, Florida Home will be the first official digital product to emerge from my insane four-year personal obsession with breaking down our vast, horizontal, suburban area into its elemental geographic communities.

I can’t tell you what an amazing relief it is to finally see my big, beautiful Real Neighborhoods™ database at last emerge from its chrysalis. We still have at least two years worth of existing ideas and plans to implement, but I’m proud of this important step away from the short term-obsessed, fear-driven outsourcing of our future.

Someday we really will publicly launch a site

Honestly. Just not, you know, today. But the image above should give you a little, tiny sense of what’s coming. If your browser window is set to 480 x 113 and tilted five or six degrees to the left, anyway.

Update on our web developer job opening

A quick note that the job opening I wrote about last week has finally been posted on Djangogigs.com. The job description there has been slightly rephrased to emphasize Python and Django, but it’s the same position described here. That is all.

Job opening: Get your programming on in West Palm Beach; work with a team of, frankly, ridiculous awesomeness; build bum-blowing stuff that will make your mom proud and impress your friends and neighbors

Here’s an opportunity so brilliant that only my very best Pokeweed picture can do it justice: The Palm Beach Post is looking for a full-time critical thinker and problem solver to join a small team of innovative coders. This job would involve or naturally lead into coding, user experience brainstorming, data modeling, server architecture, and analytics.

Must be self-driven, inquisitive, and eager to learn. Must ask good questions and thrive without extensive direction. Must enjoy getting your hands dirty with unfamiliar systems as necessary. Must be experienced with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, SQL and at least one of the following languages: Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP. Experience with Django or a dialect of Lisp a plus.

Who are we? People who appreciate somber hats and spectacular mustaches, that’s who. How should you get in touch? E-mail me here for more information, or hop on The Twitter and contact @wensing or @wmhartnett. Afraid of the ruinous technologies of our industrial society? Very, very loudly shout something like, “HEY, MATT AND MARK!”, followed by your question or contact information. We’ll be listening closely.

Here’s the listing on Yahoo! HotJobs, if that’s your thing. Hopefully coming soon to Djangogigs.com. Any other recommendations for places to post it?

Another big moving day at the office

What a crazy year. I kicked it off by moving out of the metro department, where I’d been a reporter and computer-assisted reporting specialist for more than six years, and onto the editorial web team. That meant a move out of the newsroom, down a long hallway, and into a different building. (Do click on that last link, as it’s so totally sweet.)

More recently, following this summer’s cutbacks, there’s been a lot of restructuring around the office, (more…)

A Backyard Post programming note: A little school data update, a little mental rambling

Just posted over at The Official Backyard Post Blog: Just added: 2007-2008 FCAT results and school grades, 2008-2009 attendance zone maps. Come for the boring incremental data update announcement, stay for the indecipherable, insanely pointless exploration of two styles of labeling school years.

A Backyard Post programming note: For your browser and OS stat viewing pleasure

Just posted over at The Official Backyard Post Blog: 107 days of Backyard Post browser and operating system stats, for no particular reason. In which charts are posted. Just because.

A Backyard post programming note: Ignore it and it will go away

Just posted over at The Official Backyard Post Blog: We love it when a plan comes together. Never mind what we said two weeks ago about Backyard Post’s minor Firefox 3 mapping bug, because we addressed that problem the best way we know how: By sitting around hoping it would resolve itself. Also, there’s a picture of John “Hannibal” Smith over there, and how sweet was The A-Team, right?

A Backyard Post programming note: Firefox 3 is go, mostly

Just posted over at The Official Backyard Post Blog: A quick note about Firefox 3. We’ve been fighting the good fight against the the least modern browser still widely used, now we just have to get our pretty parcel-shading scheme to work in in the most modern browser soon to be widely used.

A Backyard Post programming note: Now with maps that work

Just posted over at The Official Backyard Post Blog: Google Maps road map tiles problem fixed. In which an important lesson about using a Google Maps enterprise license is learned.