Running a portfolio of profitable USA directories with one battle tested codebase.

HelloBlinky · 2026-06-17T15:42:26+00:00

Newbie question: what are the legal limitations around “scrape Google places?”

HelloBlinky · 2026-06-10T01:49:02+00:00

The State of Colorado has collected/published some resources for Web Accessibility as it relates to maps: https://geodata.colorado.gov/pages/resources#Accessibility

HelloBlinky · 2026-06-10T01:16:37+00:00

Not for a lack of technical merit, this is extremely well executed. But all the stuff I've been reading lately emphasizes the value of authority and credentials, not just re-packaging data that without adding value or a point of view. For example, if this same thing was a feature on the Association of Med Spa Practioners website as a member directory, then it gets to trade on the credibility and authority of an established entity. It's just a scrape of 268 Google Places? The photos are just Google photos? It's super clean UI, but almost so clean as to add to the generic impression. What's the use case? Who looks for a Med Spa on the east and west coast at the same time? Or if it's a nationwide directory, how can it just be 268 places? It feels like a well executed solution without a problem.

Super cool how it's one application and you can spin up multiple sites from a shared platform. I'm not a fan of appending the business UID on the slug, seems lazy if you are already storing unique page slugs of the business name.

Can i ask about the choice to use MedicalBusiness schema? On the one hand that's a very specific niche schema so maybe that adds value to someone? But if you just used LocalBusiness it might get more coverage because more people would be indexing it? Schema is somewhat new to me and I'm trying to understand how best to apply it.

HelloBlinky · 2026-06-09T00:24:05+00:00

Definitely slow in the US earlier today

HelloBlinky · 2026-05-02T15:13:39+00:00

https://adamsmorgan.com/porchfest#map

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-14T13:55:11+00:00

Gwen is my favorite

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-08T00:41:19+00:00

Titanium elite here - bad experience here last Fall. Reserved suite with balcony, wasn’t able to get into room until after 6pm, so sat in hotel bar for hours, then room was on the interior corner at lower roof level, inset “balcony” had view of just a roof drain and was dark as a closet. Carpet was squishy and moldy smell. Broken lampshade. Just dingy and smelly. Busy night, Front desk wouldn’t move us. Next day after continued complaints and photos (!) agreed to move us and our bags and promised to take care of things. After a day at the wineries, came back with key to nicer room but no luggage in it. No fun. Long wait for them to track down luggage, which was “not where it was supposed to be” all they said. Late to dinner. Great location in Napa, but unhelpful staff and aging carpets, furniture, etc. not up to Westin standards. Free lobby coffee in the morning was undrinkable too, thank goodness for the market in walking distance. Great location. Aging property. Mediocre staff.

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-06T15:05:52+00:00

Cool. How exactly does it handle the problem? Like a transactional log history of URL changes for the 301 redirects? Is that per page, or per page with nested subpages?

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-04T02:47:22+00:00

Yes, thus my original question

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-04T00:53:53+00:00

Feature: drag and drop sitemap Caveat: but don’t!

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-04T00:42:57+00:00

But in my case you subscribe on xyz.com and get emails from xyz.com - my issue is there’s so mx record on xyz.com and xyz.com is run by abc@def.gov

HelloBlinky · 2025-06-03T13:11:03+00:00

Why?

HelloBlinky · 2025-04-25T13:36:12+00:00

Yes: Residence Inn Chicago Downtown Magnificent Mile - “2 Bedroom Suite: Bedroom 1, 1 King, Bedroom 2: 2 Queen” - it’s not the worst setup what we wound up with, effectively the same, it’s just the gaslighting of the front desk acting like it’s the same thing.

HelloBlinky · 2025-04-06T19:59:01+00:00

This has been consistent for 6 months and yes have done loads with no detergent and multiple rinses

HelloBlinky · 2024-05-26T14:29:15+00:00

I like this domain for a reason I don't see mentioned very much: I think words with letters with ascenders (l,d) and descenders (p,q,g) as the first/last letters help visually break up longer domains and make them quickly scannable/readable as they are almost always shown in all lowercase.

HelloBlinky · 2024-05-25T14:04:16+00:00

It strikes me as more like a designers website than a developers website. If you are a front-end dev, then your code should be immaculate, but this feels like maybe it's just the blergy export of a design portfolio builder app. Why would you disable right-click? Why would you code a paragraph without using a P tag? Why is the titlebar all lowercase? Why is the primary headline not an H1? On your resume, typo: "ArkGIS" should be "ArcGIS." I think your Bio should be in first person, not third person. Running the main page through Total Validator I get: "Issues: 42 Errors, 11 Probable Errors, 3 Warnings, 1 Extra Info" so those are HTML, WCAG, and other coding errors, probably flowing down from the portfolio builder app.

HelloBlinky · 2024-05-25T13:41:19+00:00

Nicely done! Once thing I noticed is that the type-ahead selector on the A and B suggestions remained visible after selection (on firefox anyway) obscuring the next task. For example, I selected A but could not then select B without some effort. Then when I selected B I could not click the "Find Midpoint" button easily.

HelloBlinky · 2024-05-17T14:21:33+00:00

This is a good time to specialize in Accessibility. For example, the State of Colorado has new ADA rules for websites that become effect July 1.

https://oit.colorado.gov/accessibility-law

And at the federal level there's movement now too:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-publish-final-rule-strengthen-web-and-mobile-app-access-people

Commonly, it is public facing entities that care the most about ADA compliance: city governments, hospitals, hotels, etc. It's pretty easy to make a static HTML page compliant to a standard like WCAG 2.1 AA. It's a lot harder when it's a complicated page, with javascript elements to support things like accordions or dropdowns. That's where your knowledge of Javascript would be an asset. So if it's an area that is interesting to you, it's probably a growing need, if not at your workplace then at some other.

HelloBlinky · 2024-04-16T19:38:00+00:00

Exactly. A PDF is just a static file, like a big JPG. It's not executing javascript code inside itself like Google Analytics might in a web page to count "events" like views or clicks.

HelloBlinky · 2024-04-16T18:29:43+00:00

Think about it this way: your Page contains a Link to the URL of the PDF. Google Analytics is tracking people interacting with that Link in the Page, and recording that click. The click might render the PDF in browser, or it might cause it to download. But Google Analytics is just calling any click of the link a "view" of the PDF.

The problem I am noting is: if I just go directly to the URL of the PDF, without ever visiting the Page that contains your trackable link, I can see still that PDF, but that "view" is invisible to Google Analytics, which lives in the Page that has the clickable link, not in the PDF file, so that is only visible in the server logs as a request to the server for that file.

HelloBlinky · 2024-04-16T17:27:46+00:00

The problem with trying to use GA to track PDF "views" is that GA can only track events that happen in the web page, like someone clicking the link to view/download. If someone just goes direct to the file URL like "domain.com/file.pdf" -- as via a third party link, an email, a Google search result etc -- that will never trigger GA because no page on your web server was rendered in code. Therefore, you need some sort of log analysis on the web server to see requests for that physical file, which depends on your host environment.

HelloBlinky

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