If you are a regular visitor then you've probably noticed that we made some design changes yesterday afternoon. The transition went off without a hitch thanks to The Open Planning Project's Anil Makhijani, Andy Cochran and Rob Marianski. I just wanted to take a moment to walk you through the new design and
provide another opportunity for feedback here in the comments section.
For Streetsblog, one of the big goals of the redesign was to make our San Francisco, Los Angeles and National Blog Network
web sites more accessible. In the old design, links to these sites were
buried in our sidebar. Now you can find them via the tabs in the
header.
You can still find handy links to the Comments, Calendar and Submit Content
pages up in the Streetsblog header as well. "Submit Content" used to be
called "Contribute" but we thought that it sounded too much like we
were asking for money (which we may be doing soon, but not yet). For
now, we're just asking you to tag your links, photos and videos so we
can feature them here on Streetsblog. This is actually a really
interesting part of the web site if you haven't visited it before.
Read on..
We’re proud to announce our latest version of melkjug is now live on http://melkjug.org . This release focuses on speed and supporting more users — so please give it a try and then tell your friends. 
We’re hoping to establish a solid core of users who would be interested and involved enough to make collaborative filtering a possibility in the near future.
We’re also proud to announce that with this release, we are now using CouchDB as our recommended and production backend. After some exciting initial results, a lot of listening to how others are using it and watching the course it has been taking, I feel confident that it is a very solid and natural match for melkjug going forward. Additionally, it just rocks and it’s a pleasure to work with 
During this cycle we significantly refactored the underlying model of melkjug. Firstly, to make it faster and more usable in general. Secondarily, to tease it apart a bit more to open it up to other useful things we might want to do with its underlying tech. I’ve had some interesting offline conversations with Ian, Nick G and Rob Marianski lately about the possibility of integrating geo-coding and filtering into melkjug to do a separate geo-ish application that I think could be a very exciting project and test of how transportable melkjug’s underpinnings are. I invite those of you who are interested to check out the development site for info on what melkjug looks like on the inside and to join our discussion with your ideas of what else could be done with what we’re up to so far and where we should head next.
A nice write up on Streetfilms and the rest of the Livable Streets Initiative. Excerpt:
Members of Community Boards 2 and 4, West Siders and
transportation advocates came out to New York University last Tuesday
to view a series of short films celebrating innovative techniques that
cities around the world are using to make their streets safer for
bicyclists and pedestrians.
The films
transported the audience to a life-size chess game on a Melbourne
street, showed kids playing stickball in Havana and offered a look at
Paris’s bus rapid transit system.
Read the whole article.
The Streetsblog Network just announced the release of their beautiful new Action Widget. In their words:
The
Action Widget is a tool that members of the Network, or anyone else,
can install into the sidebar of their blog using the code found on this page.
Network editor Sarah Goodyear will update the Action Widget regularly
with legislative alerts, breaking news and top stories from blogs
participating in the Streetsblog Network. [...]
One of the big
goals of the Streetsblog Network is to get livable streets advocates to
take a moment to lift their heads from their important
neighborhood-level work and take note of the fact that 2009 is going to
be a watershed year for federal transportation policy, and they need to
be involved in shaping that policy. If they're not, then the
policy-making will be done by the business-as-usual folks, the Road
Gang who, incidentally, can not find 200 local bloggers writing
enthusiastically about the shovel-ready road widening on the outskirts
of town. The Highwaymen have no such grassroots movement behind them. [...]
So,
we hope that the Action Widget can help progressive transportation
bloggers to keep their readers
informed, mobilized and connected to other local activists and to the
action taking place on the federal level.
