Here’s what I’ve decided. This site will be RSS or in the browser only. No auto cross posting to Bluesky or Fediverse or what ever might come next. I can pull in my Bluesky posts or GitHub activity or what ever else I’m doing “out there” but what I post here is for here.

20 years. That’s how long I’ve been putting words and pictures on the web. I’ve done a lot of other things during that time but my fascination and desire to make a living doing it hasn’t changed. I still think it’s magic.

I haven’t posted much here or worked on any of the things I’ve said I was going to work on because I have another blog. That has nothing and everything to do with what I’ve learned the last 20 years and maybe is a culmination of everything I’ve learned (or more importantly, still need to learn). After my experience with Code for America and the local Code for Tampa Bay brigade, I still wanted to help. Do the smart, right thing. Advocate through digital services for the vulnerable. I didn’t make any inroads with local government while I was involved with C4TB, I tried numerous times to reach out with ideas about projects other brigades were working on, particularly Adopt-a-Drain. I was blown off at every stop. I marked that up to my naivety of the non-profit world as well as burned bridges before my involvement. The weekend hack-a-thon, "tech will solve it” hype did no one any favors with career technologists stuck with antiquated procurement processes, dwindling budgets and subject to shitty third party vendors software. I’d like to think at this point I’ve built a little trust and now only stymied by the business/non-profit side of the equation. Along the way, I began following City Council to try and figure out where I might be able to help. Where to volunteer. Where to try and step up, use what privileges and tools I have to help. I was unsuccessful. Folks either didn’t care for me or weren’t interested in what I was advocating. But I kept following, asking questions, frustrated there wasn’t some place to find them. I questioned processes and the rules. And through that I began writing out my thoughts and observations about the week-to-week as well as major decisions being made. I didn’t want to just rant on Twitter or firing off emails every two days to City Council. Instead I put it all on a blog.

That led to wanting to bring awareness to the types of issues Council was voting on every week. Not everyone is interested in every topic, but what ever issue it is you are passionate about, at some point it intersects with the city. From a macro level with the budget to individual contracts through land use changes these are opportunities for you, me, us to shape how our city grows and changes. I believe in bottom up change and am trying to be a part of that. I realize not everyone—few—are going to agree with me on most issues, but I would at least like for everyone to be working off the same information and facts Which leads to discussions about open data and transparency and we begin to come full to the “tech” side of where I started.

I have built a couple of things, or in the process thereof related to city data. First, there’s an RSS feed for city calendar events that I found full of interesting items, but they showed up so late in the feed there wasn’t any time to even consider them. (I’ve not been great about getting out the last fews years for a variety of reasons I hope to rectify this year to some degree. Maybe when it starts to warm…) I reached out to the Technology & Innovation department and asked if there was a full feed of events or some other way to see the future events. I was directed to a json feed that contained the info I was looking for and cobbled together an ical feed that could be subscribed to. I shared that with the team that provided the json feed and received positive feedback. Last month, a team member from T&I sent a pull-request letting me know the idea was such a hit they wanted to implement it on their side but wanted to share back the improvements they made which included breaking out different sub-calendars from the firehose. I haven’t checked to see if they’ve added links on tampa.gov yet, but the calendar feeds are still mirrored here, Tampa Events ical feeds.

Another idea that has been brewing in my head and occasionally even as code, came from listening to public comments at City Council. There has been a back-and-forth between community leaders and city staff over “public notice” for re-zonings and land use changes including variance requests. Tampa has “overlay” districts that aren’t as strict as historic district designation, but do carry certain design criteria related to a broader historic area of town. These are particularly of interest to some folks. At the time, city staff pointed to a map of current development applications as a way for the community to know what is going on in their neighborhood. I love digital maps. I built a City of Tampa zoning and future land use map. But dots on a map aren’t a great way to explore the information or see what’s new. Which led me on a journey to find the source of the map data and bring it to the web in a more explorable way. Potentially generate a weekly list of new projects. But the goal was to give the folks that want to know what’s going on, for what ever reason, to be able to view and filter the applications by type and neighborhood. That led to the data being made available in table form that can be exported from the map page to them feeding the data into ArcGIS and providing an api endpoint. From there I played around with ways to serve it and settled on using Datasette with a script I built using GitHub CoPilot and Claude LLM. It pulls the data from the feed once a day, pipes the geojson into a SQLite database, and serves it on the web. The deploy action is currently broken, but the code is open on GitHub. I’m pulling down the latest database that does get updated in an action and doing manual deploys for the time being. It’s still in what I would call alpha phase but the data can be explored now. Current Tampa development coordination applications. I hope to move it to beta this week. This has also been shared with the data team with the city and they shared their appreciation for my efforts. I demoed it to another team on the Accela and development coordination side. One person called it impressive and I think it also gave them some tangible ways they can think about better presenting the data at the city level. Until then I’ll keep tinkering with this tool and hopefully help some folks keep up with changes in their neighborhood. A lot of times not knowing what’s going on with a possible development is worse than knowing.

So that’s not nothing and why my attention to my personal site and being Indie Web hasn’t been a priority. I’m also still actively looking for steady work. It’s not been pretty for me. I didn’t bounce back professionally after the pandemic and the need for a web generalist who prefers HTML/CSS/JS in that order isn’t in high demand. I can be reached at howdy at this domain if you know of an opportunity or would like to discuss how I could help you with your web project. Ideally I would find something that allowed me to continue what I am doing with Tampa Monitor and data/mapping work. I recently came across a group in Chicago, DataMade. I’d love to be a part of like that in Tampa. With help, I think I could build it. But this was brain dump and reflection and mostly a test if my deploy still worked. Be kind to yourself.