Tag: Directory Refresh

Forging Ahead: The Forge Joins the 3D Map, Plus Courts, IU Campus and a Smarter Weekly Email

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.

Open The Forge on the map

See the events calendar

Meet Amplify Bloomington

The Forge joins the map

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.

Add your business

Open the 3D map

October 19, 2026
A New Look for Every Business Page, Balloons Over the Map, and an Obituaries Page

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.

Browse the directory

Open the 3D map

Obituaries

A business page that answers the question first

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.

Add your business

Open the 3D map

October 17, 2026