patrick.net

OK, the users have spoken and the changes have been made.

Basically, I reverted the real estate forum to how it used to be. The difference is that if you set a location, you can click on that location right below the "Real Estate Forum" header and see any property comments near there.

Otherwise, you just see all property comments together, as before.

Also, you can now write a post with any title about anything, and put it in the Real Estate Forum. It will prompt you for a city or zip, so it knows where to file it, but aside from that, it's the same as any other forum.

More suggestions?

The map is still more of an annoyance than useful. If you use your mouse roller to scroll down the page, you then inadvertently zoom the map. And it's not a very good map. As a mapping guy, I think it's better to leave it off unless it is really useful. Just being able to click the address as a link to Redfin or Google maps is a better solution than the map you provide.

The point of the map is to show what other comments are nearby.

It also makes it easy to see a new address and get to the page for that address on my site just by clicking on the map.

I couldn't do that with just a link to Redfin's maps. They don't have access to my database.

Since I don't have a mouse roller (using only Linux and Mac) I never ran into that zooming problem, but I'll find a Windows PC somewhere and check it out.