Welcome to neighborhoods.org

Eric Fredericks • Thursday January 10, 2008

I want to welcome you to our new website, neighborhoods.org!

Some of you probably already guessed that this was the new website, since I had to effectively put the website up live a few weeks ago. There are still some technical issues that I’m dealing with behind the scenes. Plus, the site design and layout is not completely finished, so you may see some changes over the next few months. I’d appreciate your feedback on the new look.

The old domain, walkableneighborhoods.com, is still in the process of transferring to my new web host. This transfer should be completed next week. Within a few weeks, hopefully all of the old pages will redirect to the new pages at neighborhoods.org.

Those of you that subscribe to the feed (including those by e-mail) probably noticed some glitches and old articles posting over the last few weeks. I apologize for those—I was working out some of the kinks with the feed. I believe all of the kinks have been ironed out (for those that are interested: the Feedburner feed address has not changed, it has been updated with the new website feed). And—I think we finally have author names in the e-mail subscriptions!

Why the Change?

You may be curious why I decided to make the change. After getting some feedback from web experts and the public in general, I felt that the old domain name was too long. I was graciously given the opportunity to purchase neighborhoods.org at a reasonable price, and after some long consideration, decided to purchase. I felt that the neighborhoods.org name is much easier to remember, and can be used as a better branding identity. I can just simply say “I run the website neighborhoods.org”. Much easier than explaining the whole Walkable Neighborhoods thing.

We will not be moving away from the topic of walkable neighborhoods—this will still be the site’s main focus.

In fact, I have started working on a project that I’m hoping will shape the face of walkable neighborhoods in the United States. It’s going to be a terribly challenging project to implement, but it’s something I feel compelled to do. In order to effectively do this project, I also felt I needed to switch to a web host that could handle the type of processes and the potential traffic load I expect this site to someday reach. I have big expectations, but can’t really reveal anything more at this point. So stay tuned.

Photo Changes

If you ever visited the photo gallery at the old site, you saw that I had several thousand photos from all over the world related to walkability. I used Coppermine software and hosted all of the photos on my host’s server. While I certainly liked many aspects of running my own gallery, I had many problems with it: A security hole in the software once led to me being threatened with a letter from an attorney at a major company, comment SPAM was hard to combat, and photo tagging and categorization was cumbersome. Plus, I was running out of space to store my 10,000+ photos.

So, I’ve decided to switch to Flickr as my host. I now have unlimited photo hosting and robust tagging and categorization capabilities. I am in the process of uploading all of the photos. I have not released many to the public yet, but you can view the ones I have uploaded here. I plan to allow for free downloading and usage of the photos (under a Creative Commons license). I know there are other walkable-related galleries out there, but most place many restrictions on photos. I really just want people to have an arsenal of photos at their fingertips to use in presentations and reports so that we can keep preaching the good word on smart growth and walkability. As time permits me to do so, I will be tagging my photos with as many categories as possible so that you can easily find an example of any type of walking, biking, or smart land use related facility.

Other Things to Watch For

I plan to get back to more article writing once these technical issues are addressed. I really got away from frequently posting for a while. I was extremely busy and traveling a lot toward the end of last year. I also moved five blocks to Midtown Sacramento. Plus, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with these websites, and so I took a bit of a break. Now I’m fairly certain where I want to go with this new site.

I will also be adding links to other useful websites and resources to the new site.

I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I really appreciate all of the readers that have stuck with us through this transition. Hopefully this will be a great new year for us and those of you involved in the fight against global warming, obesity, air pollution, and oil consumption.

 

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Back From Seattle. Ohio. Back Online.

Eric Fredericks • Wednesday August 29, 2007

Greetings everyone! We had some website issues that took us down for a while. Unfortunately, it also took our site traffic way down. It’s amazing how that can happen so fast. We’re making a steady recovery though and we’ve upgraded our software to the latest version which will hopefully solve the problems.

I had an absolutely fantastic time on my trip to Seattle and Ohio. Seattle had perfect weather and I was stunned at how nice the city was. I hear that I was very lucky. The photo above is one of Seattle’s famous neighborhoods, Capitol Hill. I also had the opportunity to hike on Mount Rainier with fantastic weather as well. Surprisingly, the hike there rivaled my best hikes at Yosemite.

Ohio was great too. Very hot and humid though. I visited old friends and attended a wedding in Wooster. I got to hang out in historic old towns like Germantown, Oxford, and Miamisburg (pictured below). I also stopped in Columbus on my way to the airport to get carry out from one my favorite restaurants, Bento Go-Go. Their Veggie Bi Bop (a twist on the classic Korean dish) is just killer.

I shot over 800 photos on my trip and it’s been a bit cumbersome going through them on top of the 7,000 other things going on right now. Expect more posts with photos soon!

 

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Sleepless, Postless in Seattle and Ohio

Eric Fredericks • Friday August 10, 2007

August has been insane month so far, and that’s before I started traveling. Today, I’m going to make it even more insane. I’m headed to Seattle to visit some friends and explore its walkable neighborhoods. After a few days, it’s off to Ohio to visit friends in Dayton and a wedding in Wooster. So, I may or may not be able to post while I’m there. Rest assured, I will be taking heaps of photos! Do expect some new posts from some of our other columnists as well.

I’m leaving you with a photo of Riverscape in Downtown Dayton. It’s a lovely development along the Great Miami River. I really expected a photo from Dayton to make the photo series, but it didn’t work out that way.

 

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What's New With Us

Eric Fredericks • Saturday June 2, 2007

April and May were rather busy months, and I’m afraid my writing frequency suffered because of this. June might not be any different for me, but I wanted to share some ideas and changes I have in mind for the direction of Walkable Neighborhoods. These changes might help free up some time for additional postings.

First, I wanted to give an update on me since many of you have been asking. I have mostly recovered from the stomach ailment and am feeling much better, thanks for your well-wishes! The same goes for my broken ankle, the healing has been slow going, but I am walking with very little pain now and hope to be playing active sports again soon. I plan on giving a full article into what it’s like to go through this process through the eyes of a pedestrian advocate and a social observer. It’s been quite interesting and challenging. I’ve been waiting until I was “healed,” but the process has been slower than expected.

I also said that I had some big news to share a few months back. I was asked to start writing on a blog for a large real estate organization (hmm…), but unfortunately, the company is focusing attention on another project right now and, in fairness to the writers, have put us on hold until they can focus more attention to the blog. That’s no problem for me, my time is stretched really thin as it is and I don’t want to take too much time away from this site. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

 

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Introducing Our Newest Contributors

Eric Fredericks • Monday March 26, 2007

You may have noticed a few new authors posting articles for us lately. The great thing about each of them is that they all work in different career fields, yet all are strong advocates for walkability. We have a politician, a technical writer, a Realtor, and a transportation planner. We’re very lucky to get such a broad range of knowledge and I think it’s part of the reason our site traffic has increased by 2,900% in the last few months and truly is one of the fastest increasing trafficked websites in the world according to Alexa. Let me introduce our newest contributors:

Chris Bradshaw is the first politician to contribute to the website. He is the former leader of the Green Party of Canada and now runs a car sharing service in Ottawa, Ontario called vrtuCAR. America Walks named him the “father of pedestrian advocacy in North America” in 2001. You can read more about Chris in his Wikipedia bio. Look for an article from him in the upcoming days.

Mark Dempsey is an award-winning technical writer and a former Realtor, loan officer (mortgages and SBA), and appraiser. He spent many wasted (what he says) years as Vice-Chairman of the Rio Linda / Elverta Community Planning Advisory Council for the County of Sacramento. He is also very active on the Congress for New Urbanism listserv, where we “met.” You can see Mark’s résumé here.

Toby Boyce is s a REALTOR with Disbennett Real Estate in Delaware, Ohio. He spent 15 years as a professional writer for various newspapers and colleges around Ohio before making the move to real estate in July 2006. He also runs a fantastic website — Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio — that you should visit.

And last but not least, my friend Lauren Hilliard. She is a transportation planner for Fehr & Peers in Sacramento. She also is a board member for Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) for Sacramento and will be involved in the Sacramento Urban Design Alliance’s State Fair Transportation Exhibit this summer. She recently completed a study abroad program in Europe and wrote several articles for this site while she was there. You can view her articles here. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

 

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Bored? Walkable Neighborhoods Jobs!

Eric Fredericks • Friday February 2, 2007

You may have noticed that we have a new link on the sidebar that says “Jobs.” With the help of Job-a-Matic, we now have a new Jobs section on our website. If you visit our jobs page, you can see the job we posted. We are looking for creative minds to write for our website. More information about that posting can be found here.

There are some neat features about our jobs section. First, you can easily post a job on the page. When you post a job, it will stay on the site for a specified amount of days (currently 45 days). Since the job section is part of the Simply Hired network, your job listing automatically goes into the Simply Hired database along with thousands of other job listings. These listings are picked up by various websites, including some major sites. So, your listing will not only be seen on this website, but also on potentially hundreds of websites. For cheap. Currently, it is only $25 to post a job ad.

The other great feature is that we can “backfill” job listings. Meaning that we can pull job advertisements from the Simply Hired database based upon keywords. There are some great walkable-related jobs listed. A few of the gems that I recall seeing include the State Ped/Bike Coordinator position with the Oregon DOT (Michael Ronkin’s old position), and the Bike/Ped Coordinator for the City of Davis, California (Tim Bustos’s old position).

We hope that this will be a valuable resource for our visitors. I wanted a way that I could post our own job advertisements, plus others from around the world. I would like it to be free, however, this system will provide more benefits then a custom-built system. In addition, I didn’t want to run into a situation where I had to turn non-related potential job postings down. I’d imagine that only people posting smart growth-related jobs will be posting ads since there is a fee involved.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks TechCrunch for making us aware of this system.

 

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I Miss Walking Already...

Eric Fredericks • Wednesday January 10, 2007

I have joined the world of the temporarily disabled: I broke my ankle playing basketball the other day and will be in a cast and on crutches for the next six to eight weeks. My ankle actually doesn’t hurt that bad, it’s really the swelling that’s the worst part, but that should subside in the next few days.

I’m definitely not looking for any sort of pity, because this is nothing compared to what some people have to go through on a daily basis. I’m also very lucky in that I do not have to drive to work, because legally I’m not supposed to with my cast. My three block commute will be tough enough on crutches. The positives in this will be to experience all of the little nuances that come along so that I’m more familiar with them when writing about the needs of the disabled. Of course, it’s not as difficult as being visually impaired or confined to a wheelchair. I already try to be cognizant of the needs of all users any place I go, or in any plans or set of guidelines I review.

My desk is not conducive to typing and sitting with my propped-up leg in a cast. So, unfortunately, that will probably equate to less articles and less time spent working at the computer. But, you never know.

This incident came on the heels of some exciting news for Walkable Neighborhoods: a potential partnership with a major company. More to come on this (hopefully).

 

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My Crash, Concussion, and Disappearance

Eric Fredericks • Monday October 30, 2006

I apologize for my drifting into the unknown lately to our frequent readers, those that have e-mailed me, and those that left comments. I have a semi-valid excuse. The smashed-up car that is pictured in the photo above is the Toyota Corolla that I had just purchased. I don’t want to say too much about the collision because the insurance companies are battling it out on the claim, but I do want to share with you that I was driving the vehicle and I suffered a mild concussion. I am okay, but for a few days following the collision, I had some headaches and was very tired. And right after the collision I was pretty woozy. I have no ill-effects from the crash, except that I have been very tired in the weeks following, and have had a definite lack of motivation for writing articles. The being tired part is typical following a concussion from what I understand. One other thing that I will say about the crash is that I think that if the pedestrian facilities were better at the intersection near where the collision took place, I would guess that the crash would have been less severe. I have been thinking about that at the intersection ever since I moved to Sacramento. The ironic thing is that I was on my way to a walkability workshop!!

Another excuse of mine is that I have been traveling a lot lately with family visits and whatnot. See my large and pretty photos after the jump. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

 

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