Denver: The next frontier of urbanist blogging.

Greater Greater Washington utterly transformed Washington’s urbanist community. Before GGW arrived on the scene there were a handful of local urban blogs (including BeyondDC), but not much of a community, and our influence was minimal. GGW changed all that. It’s had an incredibly positive effect on the progressive urban agenda for this city.

Regular readers may be aware that I have roots in Colorado. Although most of my formative growing-up years were spent in Gaithersburg, I was born in Denver and received my planning degree from the University of Colorado.

Therefore, I’m really excited to be part of what is essentially a GGW clone for Colorado. DenverUrbanism.com is a new group blog from the creator of the fabulous development-tracking website Denver Infill. The new blog will provide news and opinion about transportation, development, and other urban issues along Colorado’s Front Range.

Generally, my contributions to DU.com will be cross-posts of content originally produced for BeyondDC and GGW. Whenever I write about something with national implications, I’ll publish it both here and there.

But I’m only one contributor among a team, so if you’re at all interested in Colorado or want to help their nascent urbanist community get going, head over and check it out: DenverUrbanism.com

I’ll be in Florida until Wednesday, which means there won’t be any blogging until then. Tweets will continue uninterrupted.

Does BeyondDC look a little weird today? I switched the left and right columns, so that “Features” and “Site” are now on the left, and “Twitter” and “Photos” are now on the right.

This should make the site load quite a bit faster. Locating the Twitter feed before the main blog content was slowing things down.

Clarification: Please note that the “Newsfeed” is NOT the RSS feed for the regular BeyondDC blog. The Newsfeed was a totally separate publication that passed on news headlines without comment. You can see what it looked like here. The main BeyondDC blog will continue to feature the same sort of articles it always has, and will continue to be syndicated via RSS. Apologies for any confusion. My fault for not better explaining the difference.

Despite the poll in January that showed support to keep the Newsfeed, I am finding that it is increasingly difficult to keep it up. Twitter is easier to maintain and is regularly followed by about 10 times more readers than the Newsfeed. Between that and GGW’s Breakfast links (which often cover the same stories) the Newsfeed is simply obsolete.

So it will be shut down in favor of an increased presence on Twitter.

But don’t fret if you’re not a fan of Twitter. You don’t have to join to read. In fact, you can use Twitter almost exactly the same way you currently use the Newsfeed.

Readers using RSS can syndicate BeyondDC’s Twitter feed into their aggregator. If you’re one of the 54% of Newsfeed readers who accessed it via RSS, just replace the old feed URL with the this one and you will barely notice a difference.

Readers used to visiting the Newsfeed home page can simply visit BeyondDC’s Twitter profile, which is nothing but a list of BeyondDC messages, exactly like the Newsfeed home page.

I’m sorry to disrupt folks who liked things the old way, but the Newsfeed has always been problematic, and at some point there’s just too much duplication of content for it to be worth my time to keep up.

Just a quick FYI that I’ve made a few minor changes to the home page. Nothing particularly worth explaining, but if it looks a little different to you that doesn’t mean you’re going crazy.

I’m out of town again Thursday and Friday, so I probably* won’t be blogging again until next week.

In the mean time, enjoy Bike To Work Day on Friday. All the cool kids are doing it.

There’s a wire in this picture, if you look closely. Image by Phil LaCombe.

I will be in Boston Tuesday and Wednesday, so there will be no blogging those days. I will however be sure to let the twitterverse know if I somehow manage to survive using their overhead-wire-laden transit network.

Twitter user @Astro_Soichi is a Japanese astronaut who takes amazing pictures of cities from 200 miles above the Earth’s surface while he orbits on board the International Space Station. He has photographed Washington at least two times.

That latter picture is such a good angle and so clear, I thought it would be fun to label it and make it a map of city neighborhoods.

Locals will probably already know this stuff, but maybe out-of-towners will find it interesting.

Aerial map of DC neighborhoods. Click to enlarge.
Original photo by Soichi Noguchi, from the ISS.

I’m going to add this to the list of features at upper right, because why not.

I’ve agreed to a deal that will extend some BeyondDC postings to the All Opinions Are Local section of the Washington Post website. The deal is part of something the Post is calling its Local Blog Network, which they describe as A group of independent bloggers from around the region coming together to share their thoughts and insights on important local issues.

You can find out more about the network at the Post’s site, including a list of bloggers taking part. Watch for BeyondDC writing there in the coming days and weeks.

I’ve been ill a few days and have not spent much time online. Expect posts to be light (if at all) the rest of this week.