The WeLoveDC blog is highlighting Near Southeast today in its Where We Live series, and gives a pretty good overview of the history and current state of the neighborhood, which I would say even if they weren't quoting me and saying all sorts of nice things about JDLand!

I rang out 2009 with a sudden burst of creativity, and so am welcoming 2010 with another tweak of the JDLand home page design.

Just a quick post to say that I'm still here, but with the snow and the holidays converging, I'm not expecting much news over the next few weeks. I'll post big news if it happens, of course, but otherwise I'll be taking it easy here on the blog. I'll tweet little things as they come along (like the great Tommy Wells Snowpocalyse interview outside the Tune Inn with City Paper on Saturday night), so if you're not already following my Twitter feed, now would be a good time, either via Twitter itself or by becoming a fan of JDLand.com on Facebook (where my Twitter updates will then automatically appear in your Facebook news feed).

* Tomorrow (Oct. 13), WASA is having a public meeting on their $2.1 billion Long-Term Control Plan to handle the pollution and flooding problems from the city's combined sewer system. It's from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Southeast Library at 403 Seventh St., SE (directly across from the Eastern Market Metro station.) Here's the meeting flyer. (Thanks to reader S. for passing this along.)

Just a heads up for folks who will still be in town on Monday (a holiday for SOME people) that I'm going to be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU 88.5 FM) from noon to 1 pm, talking about development, transportation, and the blogging thereof, alongside David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington and Michael Perkins of infosnack.org (and GGW, too). Call in or e-mail your questions! If you can't catch the broadcast live, it should be posted online afterwards. (Here's the link to the specific page about the segment.)

If you're actually reading this post on the JDLand home page rather than in your feeds or via e-mail, you're probably noticing that the home page looks a little different this afternoon. After many months (years!) of trying to figure out how to make it not quite so much of an assault on the senses, I finally decided that it's time to move the big ole' development map off the home page.

Those of you who actually visit the site to read my blog (rather than using RSS or e-mail) may have noticed a little addition late last week: the "More Posts" links at the bottom of each entry. These take you to all previous blog posts about a certain subject/development/location--it was possible to get to these lists by going to the project pages and clicking on the "News" tabs, but there are some subjects (like Cornercopia or the Little Red Building or the inauguration) that don't really have a project page but where people might want to easily browse past posts. You'll also find these categories (and there's a boatload of them) on my Blog Archive page.

I'm not really sure how useful this will end up being, but I was in a proof-of-concept mood yesterday and created a Transit Options in Near Southeast page, taking advantage of the new and existing live status options for Metrorail, Circulator, and Metrobus. You'll see boxes displaying the next trains at the Navy Yard station, the next Circulator arriving at New Jersey and M (though I'm not sure how handy this one is--aren't there pretty much always buses sitting there?), and the upcoming Metrobuses arriving at New Jersey and M.

When I first started taking photos of Near Southeast more than six years ago, I had no grand plan. Every few months, I went out and snapped a few shots here or there, rarely ever even getting out of the car. As time went on and development projects got underway, I found a methodology that worked for me--stand on each corner of an intersection and in the crosswalks, and take the same angles. This allowed me to build the automated displays of before-and-afters, where I'd pick the best of the "before" angles of a certain location (even if that photo wasn't necessarily the oldest one in my collection showing that angle) and then focus on replicating that angle as construction progressed.

City Paper's new Best of DC issue is out, and their staff picks include one for Best Local Web Site, where Brightest Young Things is marked as best, but another site gets all the verbiage: "Credit JDLand with thoroughness. If there is a development--however puny, however bureaucratic--regarding the commercial and residential layout of near Southeast D.C., this site may well break the news and will certainly have all the analysis and documents behind it. The site's blog items refresh very regularly and there are cool interactive maps and the like. JDLand, in fact, might just deserve a higher ranking, if only it weren't so nasty." The entry goes on to target my list of highlighted-in-red items on my contact page as the chief example of my nastiness. Perhaps Erik would like to serve as frontline secretary for my inbox without all of those caveats (which I have always considered to be wry, not nasty), and I'd like to think that the people who do contact me via that page get a pretty nice response 99.99% of the time. But oh well. I still very much appreciate the pick.