Something active. Something to do together. Then a meal.
Moving around town keeps the conversation easy, and it gives you a way out if the chemistry is not there. One reader who suggested this guide said her last date went art first, dinner second, and that is a good pattern to copy.
Everything below is a listing in our directory. Hours and seasons change, so check the place’s own page or call before you go.
Can’t decide? Spin a date
Can’t decide? Spin for a coffee, an activity, something to do together and dinner.
Start with coffee
For a first meeting at any age, a coffee shop is hard to beat. It is public, it costs a few dollars, and an hour is a natural stopping point. If it goes well, you can add a walk or a second stop.
Rain plan: the golf simulator, bowling lanes, pottery studio, Comedy Attic and Eskenazi Museum above are all indoors, so a gray evening does not have to cancel the date.
Ages 40 to 60
Plan for a slower pace, a quieter room and a table where you can hear each other.
The Optimist, the student newspaper at Bloomington High School South, is raising money to help pay for its website. The service costs about $1,100 a year, and the paper hopes to raise enough to cover more than one year.
The yearly fee goes to School Newspapers Online. It covers the site, an app, tech support, and hundreds of journalism lessons written for teen news staffs. If local student journalism matters to you, a gift of any size helps.
115 years of student reporting
The Optimist has been South’s newspaper since 1911. Its student journalists publish news, features, sports and opinion online every day, and they print an edition once per trimester. With print that infrequent, the website is where most of their work reaches readers.
Recent stories include the marching band’s regional win, three South students named Lilly Community Foundation Scholarship finalists, and whether high caffeine is healthy for teens. We also carry The Optimist’s headlines on our Bloomington news hub, alongside other local outlets.
The paper is part of local history too. The Monroe County History Center keeps issues dating back to 1923 in its research library.
Your donation goes to The Optimist, not to Bloomington Online. We are sharing this because student journalists are part of how our community stays informed.
Since the October 19 post, working with Claude Code, we have changed a lot of Bloomington Online. There is a new menu on every page. Restaurants have menu buttons and an "Open now" filter. The 3D map shows live buses, planes, weather and road work. Neighbors can share photos, and there is a free local marketplace. We also built more of Bloomington in 3D, from the Waldron Arts Center to Ivy Tech. This post is the long version, with screenshots from the live site, starting with the things most visitors will notice.
A new header menu on every page, with a phone menu that folds away
Menu buttons on 185 restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and food trucks, plus filters for Open now, Has a menu, Order online and Vegan options
A smoother 3D map: no more startup freezes, cards you can drag on a phone, a Surprise me button and a What's new card
Live buses, aircraft, weather and water levels, and City road work on the map
Bloomington in photos, where neighbors share pictures of town
A redesigned news page, a safer weekly email and a free local marketplace
New 3D buildings: John Waldron Arts Center, WFHB's firehouse, Ivy Tech, Bloom Magazine, La Charreada and more of the Trades District
A simpler menu on every page
The old header menu had about 50 links, and on a phone it opened into a panel more than 2,400 pixels tall. Nobody was going to read all of that. The new menu has six groups: Eat & Drink, Things to Do, Directory, Marketplace, News & Resources and About, with a white 3D Map button beside them. It now has 36 links.
The new header menu. Photos, Photo of the Month, B-Town 500 Trivia and Surprise me now live under Things to Do.
On a phone or a narrow window, each group folds open one at a time instead of spilling out as one long list. At the top you get a greeting that changes with the time of day, a search box and a big 3D Map button.
The phone menu: a greeting, search, the 3D Map button and the groups, each of which opens on a tap.
Surprise me, in the Things to Do group, sends you to a random food, shop, arts, stay or fitness listing that has a photo. It is a good way to find a place you did not know about. We also added a site map to the footer, a helpful 404 page for broken links, and a search tab that finds community photos.
The directory: menus, open now and vegan options
The directory is the heart of this site, so it got the most attention. The biggest change is menus. About 185 restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and food trucks now have a Menu button, 349 menu links in all. Every link goes to the business's own menu, whether that is a page on its website, a PDF or its own online ordering page. We did not link to delivery apps, review sites or Facebook, and we did not copy menu text. A weekly check flags any menu link that stops working.
La Bonita's listing now opens with Menu, Website, Call and Directions buttons, plus a note that it is a stop on the international markets tour.
Category pages now have a Show only row. Open now lists places that are open at this moment, and each card says when it closes. Has a menu and Order online do what they say. About 209 listings have hours entered so far, so Open now gets more useful every time we add more.
The Restaurant category with Open now turned on. Baked of Bloomington shows "Open now, until 1 AM" and has a Menu button.
Vegan food got its own audit. We checked 91 businesses against their own menus. Three are tagged Vegan because the whole menu is vegan: Rainbow Bakery, Planted Bloomington and Natures Plate in Greencastle. Another 54 are tagged Vegan Options because the business itself says it has a vegan dish. The Vegan options filter on category pages uses those tags, and the tags also name what is vegan, such as vegan pizza or tofu dishes. Our vegan food guide and late-night food guide came out of the same work, and the map has a ten-stop vegan tour.
A few smaller things on listing pages. Photos open in a viewer with captions and credits, and logos now show whole instead of being cropped. There is a second reaction, Make it bloom, next to Locals love this. Business owners can use Own this business? Claim or update it to ask us for changes. A listing for a place on one of the map's tours now says so and links to the tour. WFHB, below, is a good example of the photo viewer.
The new photo viewer on WFHB 91.3 FM's listing, with a caption and a counter.
We also rewrote and fact-checked dozens of listings from each business's own website, including markets, bars, Soma and its neighbors, and added Enrich Barbershop. Duplicates were merged, a few listings we could not verify were removed, and the news feeds on the WFHB, WFIU and Bloomington Community Band pages now show the right station or group. Our Featured Eats page was rebuilt as cards for the winners of our readers' survey.
The 3D map, for everyone
These changes reach everyone who opens the map. It no longer freezes for a few seconds while the town builds. On a phone, place cards now sit low and you can drag them up to read more, or pull down to close them. The zoom and tilt buttons moved into a stack along the edge, so your thumb can reach them. On a computer, hovering over a button shows what it does. In low, close-up views, trees that stand in your line of sight now thin out, so you can see the building you came to look at.
We added some play too. The Surprise me chip under the search bar flies you somewhere new. Returning visitors get a short greeting, and saving places can bring a bit of confetti. A Fun touches switch in the ? panel turns all of it off for people who prefer it quiet. A one-time What's new card tells returning visitors about the changes, and the ? help panel now scrolls and explains each button. When you share a place on the map, a friend who gets the link sees a preview of that place.
The What's new card that returning visitors see once.
Live now: buses, aircraft, road work and weather
The new Live now button opens a menu of things that are happening right now. When we took these screenshots, it showed 47 buses on the road, one aircraft in range, 9 road closures and 9 lane restrictions, and 55 degrees with fog.
The Live now menu on a Monday morning.
Buses show Bloomington Transit and IU Campus Bus vehicles from the two agencies' own live feeds, usually about half a minute behind. Pick a route in the list to see its line and buses, then tap a bus to follow it. For trip planning, the panel links to Bloomington Transit's Track My Bus and IU Mobile.
The Buses panel lists each route and how many buses are running.A Route 6 Campus Shuttle bus on its way downtown. Follow keeps the camera with it.
Aircraft are planes and helicopters near town, from adsb.lol, with the aircraft type when we know it. There are often only a few, because Bloomington's sky is not busy, and the positions update every few minutes.
Road work comes from the City of Bloomington's inRoads list of planned work and long closures. Closures are drawn in red and white stripes on the street, and lane restrictions in orange. Tap one for a card with what, where, when and how much road is affected, then use Previous and Next to move through all of them. This is planned work, not live traffic or crashes.
A road work card for the West 2nd Street project, with a view of the closed street.
Weather and water shows the current conditions from the National Weather Service station at the Monroe County Airport and the lake and creek levels from the U.S. Geological Survey. It is on by default, so the sky on the map looks like the sky outside, with fog, rain or snow when it is there. There is a switch to turn it off. Street names are now painted on the ground, from OpenStreetMap, and signs mark the signalized intersections.
The Conditions panel with the current weather, wind, visibility and humidity, and the levels at Lake Monroe and Salt Creek.
Bloomington in photos
Bloomington Online now has a place for pictures of town, taken by the people who live here. The photos page lists the photos by category (architecture, events and festivals, parks and nature, seasons, skies and weather, wildlife), newest first or most loved. You can heart a photo or make it bloom, and photos can also be pinned on the 3D map. There is also a Photo of the Month.
Photos from neighbors, with a heart and a bloom button on each.
Share a photo takes your picture, a title and a category or two, and a person reviews every submission before it goes up. There are ten photos so far, and we would like many more.
A better news page, and a safer weekly email
The Bloomington news page was rebuilt around how people read the news. At the top is a row of links to jump to Our reporting, Latest, Today, Headlines, Local voices, Arts and media, Civic and IU, Indiana news, Events and More sources. Our own stories come first, then a single list of the newest headlines from every source. Sources that post less often now sit in a box of their own, so a page of stale links does not push the fresh ones down.
The Latest Bloomington News list, with each headline, its source, the date and the author.
The Monday email got its new look in the last post. Since then it leads with the newest story and photos, and it asks readers to forward it to a friend. The signup form now has a bot check and flood control.
The Marketplace
The Bloomington Marketplace is a place to buy, sell and give away things locally. It is free, for pickup only, and every listing is read by a person before it goes up. There are no accounts to create and no fees. You can search by category and part of town, or sell something with a short form. A page of safety tips covers meeting in a public place and paying in person.
The Bloomington Marketplace, with search, categories, parts of town and a price limit.
More of Bloomington in 3D
The map got a lot of new buildings and places over these two weeks, and most started with photographs I took while walking around town.
John Waldron Arts Center is Bloomington's 1915 City Hall, a limestone Beaux Arts building at 4th and Walnut. The model is built from the National Register of Historic Places nomination and has its entablature, the tablet that says CITY HALL 1915 and the double-height doorway. The card tells the story of the building, from the city offices and the fire department to the arts center it is today. It also has a listing in the directory.
John Waldron Arts Center on the map, with Constellation Stage & Screen beside it.
Next door is WFHB's firehouse. Using two photographs of its front, we rebuilt the old fire station with its black overhead door, WFHB 91.3 in light letters on the limestone, red gooseneck lamps, and the front door at 108 with the station's sticker and its welcome sign. The listing now shows the same photos.
The WFHB firehouse front on the map: black overhead door, WFHB 91.3 lettering, red lamps and the door at 108.
In the Trades District, we added the OT987 sculpture with its night lights, the new parking garage, the Kiln and a district walk. Last post's Forge and the Mill's glowing sign are part of the same walk. The Trades District card links all of them.
The Trades District, with the Mill, the Kiln, the Forge and the parking garage inside the district's outline.
Ivy Tech Bloomington's Ferguson Academic Building, Cook Pavilion and Shreve Hall are on the map, from the college's own information and our photographs. The card explains how the campus grew from its 2002 opening to the 2015 expansion.
Ivy Tech's Ferguson Academic Building, from the photographs and open data.
Bloom Magazine's cottage on West 6th Street was rebuilt from Street View images, with its porch, chimney and yard sign. La Charreada on North Walnut was rebuilt from photographs, down to its glass-walled dining room and slate-blue roof, and its listing now has a phone number and a photo.
Bloom Magazine's office on the map.La Charreada on North Walnut Street.
There are also new ways to explore. The map has tours for Bloomington's international markets, vegan food, the Trades District, limestone buildings, Indiana University and pickleball courts. The pickleball cards list hours, nets and access codes for each location. The limestone tour lights up its landmarks at night.
A few changes are for the person running the site. The WordPress admin has one Site Tools menu for our own tools, and a dashboard with Needs attention and Site pulse boxes, so a reminder like the monthly photo is hard to miss. The Monday email has its own admin page with a send history, a preview and a test send.
By the numbers
54 updates to the 3D map went live, and more than 200 saved code changes went into the map, the site's plugins and its theme
2,483 businesses are in the directory, 185 of them with menu links and 209 with hours
91 businesses were audited for vegan food
6 menu groups and 36 links replaced about 50 header links
5 things in the Live now menu: buses, aircraft, road work, weather and water, and hot air balloons
10 community photos and 3 marketplace listings are up, and we would like to see far more
Where the data comes from
Live buses come from the public feeds of Bloomington Transit and IU Campus Bus. Aircraft positions are from adsb.lol, under the Open Database License. Weather is from the National Weather Service and water levels are from the U.S. Geological Survey. Road work is from the City of Bloomington's inRoads. Street names and many map details are from OpenStreetMap contributors. The international markets tour started with the Indiana Daily Student's guide. Building models are our interpretation of photographs and public records, so tell us if you see something wrong.
If you own a business here
Look yourself up in the directory and tell us what is wrong. Every page has a Suggest a correction link and an Own this business? Claim or update it button. If you have a menu link, hours, photos or a new logo to send us, this is a good week for it. If you do not have a listing yet, adding one is free.
Bloomington has a longer list of international groceries and specialty food shops than most towns its size. We put eleven of them on a guided tour of the 3D map, so you can fly from one to the next and see how they sit around town.
Take the International markets tour on the 3D map → Latin, Asian, Indian, Afghan, Mediterranean and Italian food shops: from North College Avenue through downtown, south on Walnut, then out the east side.
The stops run from north to south and then out the east side. Each links to its directory listing, and its card on the map has the details we could confirm from the shop itself or from the City of Bloomington’s list of local grocers.
La Bonita Restaurant & Market: North College Avenue. A Mexican restaurant with a Latin market: tacos and birria on one side, groceries and baked goods on the other.
World Foods Market: Downtown at 2nd and Walnut. Foods from Europe, Asia and Latin America, with Nazareth Sweets pastries, olives, flatbreads, wine and sake.
Kabul Corner: An Afghan teahouse on East Third Street, open since December 2025: milk tea and pink tea, paratha naan, cardamom cookies and handwoven rugs.
4th Street International Market: A deli and grocery with gyros, spanakopita, hummus, spices and halal meats, in the same building as Dats Cajun Creole Cafe and Btown Gyros.
Little Italy Market: An Italian market and deli: pasta, olive oils, cheeses, salamis, sandwiches and cannoli.
Btown Bodega: A small market in Suite 6B of the same East Third Street building as Little Italy Market.
La Bodega Latin Market: South Walnut. A Latin grocery with a restaurant counter: breakfast, tacos, burritos and dessert ingredients such as dulce de leche.
The Olive Leaf: A tasting shop with more than 40 olive oils and vinegars on tap, plus pastas, Indiana foods and handmade chocolates.
Most of what I add to Bloomington Online is practical: the business directory, the news hub, the events calendar. This one is just for fun.
B-Town 500 Trivia is a free trivia race about Bloomington. Pick 1 to 8 teams and take turns. Every right answer moves your bike around a little 3D version of the Little 500 track, and a perfect game is all 200 laps.
A four-team race in progress. Every right answer moves your bike around the track.
What you’ll find
There are 81 questions. Some are friendly, like IU’s school colors. Some are for people who have been here a while, like who Kirkwood Avenue is named after. There are three levels: Classic, Hard, and Ramp up, which starts easy and gets harder halfway through.
I borrowed a few things from the real race:
Quals. One question per team sets the starting grid, and the pole team gets a green badge.
Exchanges. List the riders on your team and they trade the bike every turn.
Flags. A white flag for the last round and a checkered flag at the finish. In a rematch, last game’s winner wears yellow.
The photos in the game are mine, from the Little 500 Spring Series in April 2025.
Try one
What sits on top of the Monroe County Courthouse dome?
Show the answer
A copper fish weathervane. It has topped Monroe County’s courthouses since the 1820s, and it’s about five and a half feet long.
This is the part I care about most as a web designer. You can play the whole game with a keyboard (A to D to answer, Enter to move on). The text is large and high contrast, sound is off unless you turn it on, and if your device can’t show the 3D track, the game switches to a simple progress bar instead.
Taking it to Career Cruise
On Thursday, November 5, I’ll be at the Greater Bloomington Chamber’s Career Cruise, where about 1,000 7th and 8th graders meet local businesses. They’ll play a shorter version with a round about what web designers do. If you teach or run a youth group, B-Town 500 Junior takes about two minutes a game.
Tell me if I got something wrong
I checked every Bloomington question against sources, but local facts change. If you spot a mistake, send a note and choose “Story tip or correction.” I’ll fix it.
And if you play it at game night, let me know who won.
I’m Dave Martin. I run Bloomington Online, and I build websites for small businesses, practices and nonprofits at David Martin Design. B-Town 500 Trivia is built the same way I build client sites: plain, fast, and usable by everyone.
B-Town 500 Trivia is a community project from Bloomington Online. It is not affiliated with Indiana University, the IU Foundation or the Little 500.
The map has a new building on it, and I had to come up with a pun to match: The Forge, the office building across from The Mill in the Trades District, is now on Bloomington 3D. This weekend, working with Claude Code, we also added pickleball courts and Indiana University’s campus to the map, built a tour of the city’s international markets, redesigned the Monday email, gave the events page filters, and cleaned up a few dozen directory listings. This week’s featured business is Amplify Bloomington, which happens to sit across the street from The Forge. Here is everything we forged, with the screens to show it.
The Forge opened in November 2024 at 617 N. Madison Street, across Madison from The Mill. It is a three-story office building, about 22,000 square feet, meant for tech companies that have outgrown the startup stage. Folia was its first tenant, and Bloom and ViVum AI were named among the first companies to move in. It has a green roof and a rooftop solar array that was expected to cover nearly 30 percent of its electricity.
The Forge on the 3D map, with its green roofs, the solar canopy on top and the paved patio out front.
Most buildings on the map come from a lidar survey of the county. The Forge went up after that survey, so the map had nothing to start from. I sent photos I took standing in front of it, and Claude found the building in recent aerial imagery and traced its outline. Google’s own pin for the building lands inside that outline. The rust-colored brick, the glass box over the entrance, the gray tower with the Bloom sign, the solar canopy and the concrete sign wall out front all come from those photos.
I should be honest about the limits. The heights are estimates read from the photos, and I did not photograph the west or south sides, so those walls are best guesses. The card says so. If you work in the building and see something off, tell us and we will fix it. Earlier in the day we also made The Mill’s sign light up after dark and before dawn, so the two buildings now glow across the street from each other.
This week’s featured business: Amplify Bloomington
Amplify Bloomington is the Business of the Week on the homepage. It grew out of The Mill and describes itself as a civic alliance that supports regional entrepreneurship and innovation. Its coworking space is in the Trades District, and it helps local founders with scaling, access to capital and mentorship. It also connects Indiana University research with local employers and city leadership. Two people loved its listing this week.
If you are starting something, or you work for yourself and want a desk and some company, it is worth a visit. The listing has its contact details, and its card on the 3D map sits right across the street from The Forge.
One more change goes with it. When the map has nothing else to feature, such as a game or a concert, it now opens on the Business of the Week instead of the courthouse square. Today that means it opens on Amplify.
A tour of Bloomington’s international markets
The Indiana Daily Student published a guide to the city’s international groceries and markets this summer, and it made a good map. There is now a guided tour with eleven stops: La Bonita, World Foods, Kabul Corner, 4th Street International, Little Italy Market, Btown Bodega, La Bodega, Olive Leaf, Apna Bazaar, Rong Cheng and B-Town International Market. Each stop has its own card, and the grocery and specialty food pages in the directory now point to the tour.
La Bonita Restaurant & Market on the international markets tour, with its address, phone number and specialties.
A redesigned Monday email, and an events page you can filter
The weekly email has a new look. Each event has a logo or a letter badge, a short description and add-to-calendar links for Google and for Apple and Outlook. Repeating events are folded into one line. The email you get when you sign up is designed now too, and so are the pages you land on when you confirm or unsubscribe. We also made those links safer: some mail programs open every link in a message to scan it, which could have unsubscribed people on its own. The links now show a button first, and only the button does anything.
Behind the scenes there is a new page for me under Tools called Weekly email, with the subscriber list, a send history, a preview and a test send. The next email goes out Monday morning at 8:00.
The events page got the same treatment. It shows the next 30 days from our public calendars, and you can narrow it by when (today, tomorrow, this weekend, next 7 days) and by type (music or community). Each event has an add-to-calendar link and a link to its place on the map. The homepage card uses a compact version of the same list.
The events calendar with its new filters for when and what kind of event.
Yesterday: pickleball courts, and all of Indiana University
Sunday was a big day for the map. Pickleball and tennis courts are now drawn in 3D, with painted lines, nets, fences and light poles. RCA Park has its six pickleball courts, two tennis courts and the woods around them, and the Switchyard Park courts have string lights. Karst Farm, Park Ridge East and the IU Northwest courts are there too. We only drew courts we could confirm, so a few places that looked like courts on a satellite photo were left off.
RCA Park’s six pickleball courts and two tennis courts on the map.
The bigger project was Indiana University. The map now has 26 more campus places, including the Indiana Memorial Union, Ballantine Hall, Franklin Hall, IU Cinema and the Hoagy Carmichael sculpture, with notes in our own words from IU’s public campus map. There are three campus tours based on IU’s own routes. The campus itself got paved: walkways and plazas, parking lots, bike racks, emergency phones that glow at night, and signs for accessible entrances and parking, all taken from IU’s public map data.
The Sample Gates and the Old Crescent on the map, with nearby campus stops labeled.
Any business or place that is a stop on a tour now says so on its directory page, with a button that flies the map to it. The Bluebird’s card also has a new button, See who’s playing, that flies up to its marquee.
Cleaning up the directory
We kept going on the directory refresh this weekend. We rewrote and fact-checked the listings for The Sip, Atlas, Blockhouse, Soma and its sister businesses, Bethel Lane Farm Stop and the five international markets, working from each business’s own website. We merged duplicates, moved listings out of categories that did not fit, removed a few we could not verify, and corrected addresses. We also added Enrich Barbershop at 126 E. 6th Street, a new listing.
As before, anything we could not confirm we left alone. A wrong phone number costs a local business a customer, so we would rather leave a listing thin than guess.
If you own a business here
Look yourself up in the directory and tell us what is wrong. Every page has a Suggest a correction link. If you have photos or changed hours, send them in. If you do not have a listing yet, adding one is free.
Every business page on Bloomington Online has a new layout today, and the 3D map has hot air balloons drifting over town. Working with Claude Code, we also built an obituaries page, rethought how a listing page should read, and put together a plan to bring the whole business directory up to date over the next few months. Here is what changed, with the screens to show it.
The business directory is the most important part of this site, so today I asked for a UX review of the listing page. The old page opened with four buttons of different sizes, and the address, links and tags were stacked in a column next to the logo. Someone who only wanted the hours or a phone number had to scroll to find them.
The new page opens with a short intro line in the first screen, then three equal buttons: Website, Call and Directions. Everything a person needs on the way out the door sits in a card called At a glance: address, hours, phone, social links, a link to the business on the 3D map, and when the listing was last checked. On a computer the card stays in view as you read. The description, photos and specialties fill the wider column beside it.
Mays Greenhouse before (left) and after (right). Same business, same facts, a clearer order.
On a phone the card moves to the top so the address and phone number come before the long description, and the buttons turn into big icons. We checked a sample of listings for errors and the page scores 100 for accessibility in Google’s Lighthouse test.
The same page on a phone. The buttons are large and the first screen already has the basics.
Not every listing has a logo, photos and a website, so we also made sure the page holds up when it does not. This one has only a phone number and an address, and the card simply takes the full row instead of leaving a hole.
A listing with no photos or website still looks finished.
One more thing is new behind the scenes: the page now counts taps on Directions and the 3D map link, alongside the website and phone taps we already tracked. Before this change, about 16 percent of listing visits ended with a tap on the website and 1 percent with a call. Now we can see whether the new layout moves those numbers, and we will check back in a couple of weeks.
Hot air balloons, and the birds of fall
I wanted the map to feel livelier, and something specific to Bloomington. Fall is hot air balloon season here, so from mid September to mid November balloons now drift across the 3D map. Some carry a local business, such as Oliver Winery and Indiana University Credit Union, and one is a rainbow. Tap a balloon and its directory listing opens, so a bit of fun becomes a way to find a business.
A balloon carrying the Oliver Winery name floating over the IU campus, with the live clock showing early evening.
The sky has other visitors too. Geese pass overhead on their way south through November, turkey vultures circle until the end of October, and a small plane crosses now and then. Each is tied to the calendar and the map clock, so slide the clock to evening and you will see a different sky than at noon.
Turkey vultures circling over the south side of town.
We also stretched the edge of the map. A few businesses sit well outside town, like Oliver Winery, and used to have no pin at all. They now show up at the rim of the map with a link to their coordinates, so nothing is left off the map just because it is a few miles out.
An obituaries page, built carefully
People look for obituaries here more than you might guess, so there is now a page for them under Resources. It lists recent notices from Bloomington-area funeral homes and news feeds, shows a short opening for each one, and always links to the full obituary on the publisher’s own site. A search box finds a name, and funeral homes have cards of their own. Families can send us a notice through a form, and nothing goes up until I approve it.
The page needs to be respectful, so we keep it plain and show only what the publishers share. The screenshot below shows just the top of the page. We left out the names on purpose.
The top of the obituaries page, with search and the explanation of where each notice comes from.
The weekly email now carries a link to the page as well.
A plan for the whole directory
There are about 2,500 businesses in the directory. When we counted, about 1,700 of them had only a thin description, around 2,000 had no image, and many had no tags. Traffic is small, so accuracy and timeliness matter more than anything else. A stale hour or a wrong phone number costs a local business a customer.
As a first test we refreshed 13 hardware stores and garden centers. For each one we read the business’s own website, rewrote the description in our own words, fixed the address and phone, added hours, tags and a logo, and added photos from the business’s own site with credit. The ones we could not verify we left alone and flagged for a phone call. We also wrote Gmail drafts to the owners, so they know what we changed and can correct us.
The plan is steady rather than fast: about 100 listings a week, the seasonal categories first, and a regular check for dead websites. It should take around 16 to 18 weeks, and I review a sample before anything bigger goes out. A wrong fact hurts a small business, so accuracy comes before speed.
If you own a business here
Look yourself up in the directory and tell us what is wrong. Every page has a Suggest a correction link. If you have photos you would like to show or hours that changed, send them in. If you do not have a listing yet, adding one is free.
Bloomington Online got a lot more useful this week for people who want to know where to eat tonight, and a lot easier for restaurants to be found. Today, working with Claude Code, we put every day's food and drink specials on its own page, built a form that reads a photo of a menu board and fills itself in, launched a $10 gift card giveaway, and put a new landmark on the 3D map. Earlier this week we also slimmed down the header and cleaned up the site. Here is what we got done, with the screens to prove it.
Earlier this week: a shorter header, so the content comes first
The old header was 138 pixels tall before you saw a single word of content, with a centered logo, a tagline, a search box and a wrapped menu. It now sits in one row at 76 pixels. The logo and name are on the left, the menu is in the middle, search is a small icon on the right, and the 3D map has its own white button so nobody has to hunt for it. On a phone it collapses into a tidy menu.
The header before (top) and after (bottom). Same menu, about half the height.
Every day of the week gets its own specials page
People don't search for "specials." They ask what's good on Thursday. So there is now a page for each weekday, with a day navigator across the top and a "Where to eat tonight" link from the main Food page. The pages draw on two sources at once: our Google Calendar of food and drink specials, and deals that local people send in. Thursday had 17 deals on it when we took this screenshot, and nobody has to edit a page by hand for any of them to appear.
The Thursday page, with deals from the calendar and from community submissions.
Post a deal by taking a picture
This is the part I like most. A restaurant owner, or any customer who spots a good deal, can open the Submit a Deal page and upload a photo of the menu board, flyer or sign. Claude reads the picture and fills in the form: the business, the deal, the days and the times. The person checks it, fixes anything that is wrong, and presses Send. They can add a note for context, and they can submit without giving a name.
Nothing goes live until I approve it, and the photo is deleted from the server as soon as the deal is approved or rejected. We tested it on a made-up sign for The Test Tavern, with an upstairs bar and a few specials. The first screenshot is the empty form. The second is what it looked like a few seconds after the photo went in.
The Submit a Deal page before anything is entered. One box for the photo, and everything else is optional.After uploading a photo of a sample sign, the form is filled in and ready to check.
Getting there took some honest debugging. The first version failed on a real phone screenshot because a script looked for a field before the form existed, and then a cached page carried a stale security token and said it had been open too long. We fixed both, made the form fetch a fresh token every time, and tested it in a real browser until it worked from start to finish.
A giveaway, and a reason to love your favorite places
To get people to use the directory and the 3D map, we are giving away a $10 gift card to Soma Coffeehouse and Juice Bar. Enter with your email and you are in. You earn extra chances by confirming the Monday email, sending in a deal, or loving at least three businesses in the directory. Entries are capped at four per person, no purchase is necessary, and the drawing happens automatically on November 16 at 9 AM. The winner gets an email right away, copied to me and to the Bloomington Online inbox. We will change the prize from time to time so that other businesses get their turn.
The official rules are posted online, written with Indiana and Bloomington in mind. Soma is not a sponsor and we are not affiliated with them. It is simply a business we love.
The giveaway page, with the prize, the ways to earn entries and the rules.
Business of the Week
The homepage now features one local business at a time, chosen from the directory and rotated every week. It only picks listings that have a real photo and a proper description, because we learned the hard way that a card with a cut-off sentence and no picture does nobody any favors. This week it is Brightside Cafe, a 100% gluten-free cafe and bakery on the lower level of Fountain Square Mall.
Business of the Week on the homepage, with the giveaway banner above it.
A weekly email, with consent that respects you
People can now get a short weekly email on Mondays with local food and drink deals. Everyone who signs up confirms by email first. We also added a simple cookie banner that lets you decline analytics, and on the 3D map it remembers your choice.
Paper in the real world
Not everything happens on a screen. We made a poster for restaurants ("Got a special? We will post it. Free."), a giveaway flyer, and a flyer for Amplify Bloomington, the coworking space, which includes a screenshot of Amplify on the 3D map and three QR codes with tear-off tabs. Each QR code goes to a different place: the giveaway, the deal form or the map.
Three print pieces, ready to hang up: the restaurant poster, the giveaway flyer and the Amplify Bloomington flyer.Amplify Bloomington, found on the 3D map.
A local legend on the map
We also added Shalooby's to the 3D map, at 405 E Kirkwood Ave in the old Cafe Pizzeria location. It is marked as a "Local legend" landmark rather than an ordinary listing, because Shalooby's is a fake restaurant from 2024 that Bloomington took to heart, and that deserves more than a normal pin.
Earlier this week: cleaning up and measuring what matters
Not every improvement is visible. Along the way we removed 111 fake accounts that bots had registered, took spam links out of 12 business listings, and made the events pages pass Google's structured data test, so Bloomington events can show up properly in search. We also set up better analytics. One thing the numbers showed: of 18,192 page views, 11,912 (65 percent) came from Singapore, and those visitors averaged zero seconds of engagement, compared with 26 seconds for everyone else. That looks like automated traffic, and it means our real audience is smaller, and more interesting, than the raw total suggests.
Dave also set up GitHub Actions so the 3D map can be deployed to the server from GitHub, not just from one laptop.
How it was made, and what's next
All of this was built by working with Claude Code in the terminal, one request at a time. I would describe what I wanted, we would build it, check it in a real browser, and fix what was wrong. Some of the best ideas came from questions like "Is there anything else you would add?"
Next up is the 3D map itself. Thirteen species of birds are being added as animated models, so the town will have something to watch besides cars. Meanwhile, if you run a business here, send in your special. If you love a place, tell us, and you might win coffee.
This morning I made a trip into the city to meet Andrew Lambert, the consultant behind Lambert Consulting and the host of the Mind Yo' Business podcast, and show him what I built on Bloomington Online over the last three days. He pulled up his own business listing in our directory. It was there, but it was nearly blank. This post is a thank-you to Andrew for the work he does in our community, and an account of how we fixed his listing and then rebuilt the south side of the Courthouse Square from a pile of photographs.
Andrew started his advertising agency in 2010 and launched the Mind Yo' Business podcast in 2017. Lambert Consulting helps owners with traditional marketing, digital advertising, websites and hosting, and one-to-one consulting. The podcast has run for nine seasons and is often recorded live in front of an audience at Morgenstern Books on South Auto Mall Road. Season 9 this year has included conversations with Brian Dorsey of Meineke Car Care Centers, the team at Brightside Cafe, Jordan Davis on food and festivals in Bloomington, and Kaytee Lorentzen on the Chamber of Commerce.
The Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce profiled him in April as part of its Small Business Series. It describes a former professor and stand-up comedian who wanted interviews to feel like a real conversation, with very few scripted questions and room for the mistakes and pivots that most people leave out. His idea of being "selflessly selfish" is that you can chase your own success as long as you create value for the people around you, and his advice to people starting out is to be real, stay flexible and take action.
He also gives back. On his own site Andrew says he served as Marketing Director and then President of the Monroe County Autism Foundation, founded in 2011, and as an advisor and contributor to the Katie and Victor Root New Hope Scholarship at Ivy Tech Community College, which helps adult learners return to school. He is the author of Be the Lime: An Insider's Guide to College.
If you own a business in Bloomington and you haven't heard the show, start with the episodes. If you need help with your marketing or your website, he is a good person to call.
Andrew's listing in the Bloomington Online directory today.
The blank listing
When Andrew looked himself up in our directory, he found a one-line placeholder that had been generated automatically when the directory was first filled in. That is the kind of thing I have been cleaning up all week, and it was a good reminder of how many businesses are in the same position. So we fixed it. I opened Claude Code in the Terminal, told it whose listing to improve, and it read his website and the sources about him, then wrote the description, added his logo, set the categories and tags, and corrected his website address. Every sentence in it traces to something he or a reputable source has published, and the old text is backed up. His podcast's listing, which was also a placeholder, was rewritten the same way and moved to the media category where it belongs.
That is the whole method. I describe the job in plain English, the assistant does the research and the typing, and I decide what goes on the site. A written note, a link, or a photograph is enough to get it started.
From eighteen photographs to a courthouse
The part of the demonstration I enjoyed most was the photographs. The previous version of the courthouse in Bloomington 3D had a copper-green dome and a front with steps up to the doors. It was a fair miniature, but it was a guess. So I walked around the Courthouse Square and took eighteen photos: the south front, the stairs, the flower beds, the plaques, the stores across Kirkwood Avenue, and the fish on top. I gave them to Claude Code and asked it to make the model match.
The south front of the courthouse, in my photo and in Bloomington 3D.
The photos corrected the model right away. The real courthouse has no steps at its doors. The long flight of stone steps with cheek walls and green lamp posts is down at the street, and a concrete walk crosses the lawn from there. The dome is dark and ribbed, with a clock on each face of the tower and an ornate crown at the top. The model now follows all of that, along with the lettering on the building, the "Anno Domini" panel, and the group of limestone figures over the entrance.
The Courthouse Square before and after.
The details on the lawn
The photos also showed what is on the lawn, and all of it is in the map now. A state historical marker stands beside the walk with its text about the 1818 log cabin and the brick courthouse that stood here until 1906. There is the Women in Government Plaza, with its stone benches and the block carved "Sophia," and a stone marking the Center of Population. A limestone memorial to county commissioner Warren Henegar, dedicated in 2013, carries its plaque and the words "Make me an instrument of Your peace." A tall war memorial topped by a soldier stands on the south lawn. The beds along the walk are full of orange and red flowers with blue salvia.
The steps at Kirkwood Avenue, with the lamp posts, rails and flower beds.
And the fish. Its weathervane is a long slim fish with a forked tail on a pole with four arrow-tipped arms, and the dome beneath it ends in a crown of leaves and scrolls. The old model had a plump fish on a lantern, so we rebuilt it. The fish swings slowly on its pole, as a weathervane should.
The weathervane on top of the courthouse, in my photo and in the model.
Across Kirkwood Avenue
The storefronts were next. The old map had a single long brick building across from the courthouse. In reality it is six, each with its own color and character, so each one got its own front: the white building with blue-trimmed arched windows and the cream one beside it over Andrew Davis menswear and formalwear, a narrow red-brick building, the cream building with the teal cornice over Mirth and its "Browse the shops inside" sign, the tall limestone Fountain Square building with its black awning, O'Child and #skullznbunniez, and the limestone building with the oriel windows over Tivoli Fashions.
The stores across Kirkwood Avenue before and after.
These are still miniatures. The shapes and colors come from photographs taken from the lawn, so they are close but not exact, and the buildings along the rest of the Square are next.
How it works, in case you want to try it
I take photographs or write down what I want, and I put them in the Terminal where Claude Code is running.
It reads them, writes the code or the listing, and renders the result in a browser so it can check its own work.
I look at what it made, point out what's wrong, and it fixes it. Every change has a backup, so anything can be undone.
The listings follow a rule: no fact goes in unless it comes from a source I can point to.
AI makes mistakes, and today's first attempt put steps at the courthouse doors because that seemed reasonable. Photographs are what fixed it, and they are what I'd ask you for if you'd like your own business or building to look right on the map.
Visit, and say hello
Open Bloomington 3D and walk up to the courthouse from Kirkwood Avenue. Then look up Lambert Consulting and the Mind Yo' Business podcast in the directory. If you own a business, make sure your listing is correct. If it is not in the directory yet, let me know and I will add it. Thank you, Andrew, for the time and for the good work you do for Bloomington.
