Blog | Photos | Projects | Nats Park | Time Machine Photo Archive | Project Directory | Nats Park | Search | About | Contact JD
Please note that JDLand is no longer being updated.
peek >>
Near Southeast DC Past News Items: JDLand stuff
In the Pipeline
25 M
Yards/Parcel I
Chiller Site Condos
Yards/Parcel A
1333 M St.
More Capper Apts.
Yards/DC Water site
New Marine Barracks
Nat'l Community Church
Factory 202/Yards
SC1100
Completed
Thompson Hotel ('20)
West Half ('19)
Novel South Capitol ('19)
Yards/Guild Apts. ('19)
Capper/The Harlow ('19)
New DC Water HQ ('19)
Yards/Bower Condos ('19)
Virginia Ave. Tunnel ('19)
99 M ('18)
Agora ('18)
1221 Van ('18)
District Winery ('17)
Insignia on M ('17)
F1rst/Residence Inn ('17)
One Hill South ('17)
Homewood Suites ('16)
ORE 82 ('16)
The Bixby ('16)
Dock 79 ('16)
Community Center ('16)
The Brig ('16)
Park Chelsea ('16)
Yards/Arris ('16)
Hampton Inn ('15)
Southeast Blvd. ('15)
11th St. Bridges ('15)
Parc Riverside ('14)
Twelve12/Yards ('14)
Lumber Shed ('13)
Boilermaker Shops ('13)
Camden South Cap. ('13)
Canal Park ('12)
Capitol Quarter ('12)
225 Virginia/200 I ('12)
Foundry Lofts ('12)
1015 Half Street ('10)
Yards Park ('10)
Velocity Condos ('09)
Teague Park ('09)
909 New Jersey Ave. ('09)
55 M ('09)
100 M ('08)
Onyx ('08)
70/100 I ('08)
Nationals Park ('08)
Seniors Bldg Demo ('07)
400 M ('07)
Douglass Bridge Fix ('07)
US DOT HQ ('07)
20 M ('07)
Capper Seniors 1 ('06)
Capitol Hill Tower ('06)
Courtyard/Marriott ('06)
Marine Barracks ('04)
 
Go to Full Blog Archive


98 Blog Posts Since 2003
Go to Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

Tuesday Tidbits: Side Yards, BID Survey, Hampton Inn, Va. Ave. Park
A Look Back, eight years ago today: The southwest corner of 1st and M Streets, SE, with Normandie Liquors long closed and in its final few months.
* SIDE YARDS: Back for a second year is "Side Yards," an "evening of quirky amusement and wonder" showcasing top sideshow performers at the Yards Park on Saturday, Nov. 7 from 6 to 10 pm. Contortionists, magicians, juggling, escape artists and snake handling will all be showcased (sounds like a typical day in Congress!). There will also be burlesque acts, live music, and a beer garden. Tickets are free, but available in advance.
* DC BEER FESTIVAL: Also on Saturday, Nov. 7 is the DC Beer Festival at Nats Park. Admission is $40 and includes unlimited tastings (wheeeee!).
* PERCEPTION SURVEY: It's time for the Capitol Riverfront BID's annual Perception Survey, so take a few moments to tell them your feelings about the neighborhood, whether you are a resident, office worker, or visitor.
* OKAY, HOW ABOUT DECEMBER: Back in September I posted about reservations being accepted for the new Hampton Inn at 1st and N starting November 19. It's now December 9.
* THE NEW VIRGINIA AVE. PARK: ANC 6B commissioner Kirsten Oldenburg looks at the ideas that came out of last month's public meeting to come up with a post-tunnel-construction design for Virginia Avenue Park.
* THE OLD VIRGINIA AVE. (NOT) PARK: And speaking of Virginia Avenue between 9th and 10th streets, SE, this week's Lost Capitol Hill series on The Hill is Home looks at the owner of a lumber yard in that spot during the mid-1800s.
* INSTAGRAM: I'll just mention again that JDLand is now on Instagram, if that's your social media landscape of choice.
* MOBILE: I've been tweaking the mobile version of the JDLand home page to add some of the items that have only been on the desktop page--a random Look Back photo, the Highlighted Projects development map, and even the Latest Tweets box. Visit on your phone to see what I mean.
 

JDLand 2015 Reader Poll Results
The abacus has been dusted off, my fingers are sore from being used as calculators, and I've now tabulated the responses to the 2015 JDLand reader poll.
I applaud the 380 of you who responded (even if that's less than 10 percent of the site's unique visitors during the time the nine days the poll was running, so boo to the other 3,000 or so visitors who passed).
Let's get right to the headlines, before taking a deeper dive. And of course you can look at the full numbers yourselves, should you wish. (While keeping in mind that this is of course not in the least bit scientific.)
Favorite Lunch Spot: TaKorean
This was the closest of all categories, with TaKorean edging out next-door neighbor Sweetgreen by all of two votes, though together they only accounted for a little less than 30%of the vote. Third place went to Nando's Peri-Peri, with Cornercopia landing in 4th place and pretty much every other option in the neighborhood (and some not in the neighborhood, ahem) getting at least a couple votes.
Favorite Dinner Spot: Osteria Morini
This category's top vote-getting shouldn't really be a surprise, but Chef Michael White's Italian restaurant in the Lumber Shed pulled away from the competition, with 37% of the vote and 85 more votes than second-place finisher Bluejacket. And after only a few weeks in operation, Due South took 3rd place. followed by a tie between Agua 301 and Nando's Peri-Peri.
Favorite Drink Spot: Bluejacket
This category was even more of a runaway victory, as the highly regarded brewery received 44% of the vote, and about 100 votes more than Justin's Cafe, which took second place with 13% of the vote. The neighborhood's other brewery, Gordon Biersch, took third place, and Agua 301 finished fourth. (Lots of votes for some variation of drinking alone at home, though, which perhaps means the neighborhood needs an intervention.)
Looking Forward To: Whole Foods
It wasn't a resounding victory, but when forced to choose, about 29% of respondents indicated that the new Whole Foods at New Jersey and H is the next development of most interest to them, with 24% wanting Half Street north of the ballpark to get built and 20% itching for the Showplace Icon movie theater to open.
As for the other questions I asked, here's a few bullet points hitting the highlights:
* It may shock you, but it absolutely does not shock me that more than 68% of respondents were male. Definitely kind of a guy thing to be interested in photos of buildings getting built.
* Nearly two-thirds of readers are between the ages of 25 and 44. (I remember being between the ages of 25 and 44!)
* Despite my thoughts to the contrary, only 33 respondents reported owning a dog. Which mainly serves as the clearest indication that I don't have anywhere near the neighborhood readership I ought to.
* About 63% of respondents reported themselves as being neighborhood residents. And of the 55% of that group who then answered, the own/rent breakdown was 64%-36%.
* I appreciate all the sucking up by the 75% of respondents who choose "JD's witty reportage" as one of the parts of the site that is of most interest.
* Only a smidge more than 16% of those who responded said they primarily get word of new content from Twitter or Facebook. This is still Web 1.0 territory! (Mailing lists/RSS feeds and visiting the site a few times a week account for about 60% of that vote.)
* Yeah, yeah, "Navy Yard." BAH.
Feel free to check out the report and then add your own analysis in the comments.
And, to be serious for a moment, a lot of you wrote a lot of really nice things on your questionnaire, and for that, I thank you most sincerely. (And a few of you didn't, but oh well.) It's great to know you are out there and are getting some use out of all of this. And I'm resolved to perk things up a bit in return.
Three people have been chosen to as winners of JDLand t-shirts, and have been notified. (But if you want to buy one, they're $12, and are still available in S-M-L-XL.)
Comments (10)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Reader Poll: Last Call to Declare Your Neighborhood Favorites
The 2015 JDLand Reader Poll is entering its final hours, as I will stop accepting entries at 11:59 PM EDT Tuesday, Oct. 13 (a little more than 24 hours away as of this writing).
If you haven't yet taken the moment or two to fill it out (WAAAAAAH), you may not realize that it gives you the chance to vote for your favorite lunch, dinner, and drink spots in this neighborhood--and also gives you the chance to declare on your preferred name for the neighborhood, what your favorite amenities are, and what upcoming projects you are the most excited to see completed.
There's also a couple of demographic-type questions to help me better know my audience, because I can't pass up the opportunity to be nosey.
You can also enter yourself in the random drawing for a coveted JDLand t-shirt, which wlll tell everyone you pass on the street and at the gym that you are one of the tens of people getting news and snark from this little outpost of the web.
I originally said that I'll give away t-shirts to two random poll respondents, but if I get a big response during these final few hours, I may up the count. So make it worth my while!
I'll then take a little time to digest the results, and will then post the winners and the other details.
If you've already responded, thank you so much!
If you don't fill it out, just remember that you are breaking my heart and making me question whether I should even continue blogging. No pressure.
LATE UPDATE: With less than three hours to go, one of the Favorites categories has only a one-vote margin between the top two. Make sure your voice is heard!
Comments (1)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Feeling the Early Fall Doldrums? Take the JDLand Reader Poll
The gray weather of the past few days has seemed to take a bite out of everyone's energy level (except apparently for Max Scherzer), and with October now not offering the lure of playoff excitement in the neighborhood, I found myself wanting to come up with some content that might inject a bit of a spark around these parts.
I last ran a poll in 2011, but while there are some similar questions, the neighborhood is a very different place from just four years ago--so I figured why not find out a little more about favorite haunts and activities while at the same time getting some sense of who exactly JDLand's readers are.
I often say that blogging can very much feel like whistling into the wind, or talking into a phone when you aren't 100 percent sure someone's on the other end of the line, so it really does help me to know who is out there--are you a bunch of millennials Bikesharing over to Sweetgreen for some healthy eats, or a bunch of commercial real estate workers lunching on the information I post, or a bunch of Nats fans who only visit the site during baseball season? (All that and more, I imagine.)
I also decided to use this poll to finally answer the question that has nagged at me for years--is it in fact true that every Near Southeast resident owns a dog?
And if just taking a couple minutes of your time to help me out isn't enough motivation, I'm going to give away JDLand t-shirts to two random poll respondents. That right there should really do the trick.
I'll leave it up for a few weeks, then crunch the numbers and post the results.
But don't wait until the last minute! Go ahead and fill it out right now. Pretty please. With sugar on top. (And no ballot-box stuffing!)
If you run into any errors, let me know.
Comments (7)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Well, That Was Fun.
I think I can start breathing again.
JDLand.com runs on a shared server, and late last week one of the other sites on the server must have made someone veeeery angry, because a Denial of Service attack was launched that ran until Monday evening. On Monday morning, I decided it was time to get off that rickety server and into a new shared environment (with the same company), but it took another 24 hours for them to get me my files from the old server.
I have no doubt there are still bugs to be squashed, and I will be spending my day looking for them.
In the meantime, thanks for everyone's patience. I know it didn't matter anywhere near as much to you readers as it mattered to me, but I hated knowing how annoying it was to come to the site and have it not respond.
Hopefully things will be back to normal now. Though as long as I stay in a shared environment (which is about four times less expensive than getting a virtual private server), these sorts of things can happen.
UPDATE: A few things are not yet back to life--the RSS feed, the little box on the home page showing the most recent comments, and an updated Permits/Crime list. Otherwise, so far, the move itself hasn't been too bad, other than the very sore jaw from five days of clenching my teeth.
UPDATE II: The above lingering items are now fixed. I imagine there's still other stuff somewhere that's not working, but nothing leaping out at the moment.
Comments (6)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Tuesday Tidbits: What's in a Name, Anyway?
Catching up a bit:
* CHEF SCOUTING: Master chef Peter Chang and his partners are "looking in the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood for a 6,000-square-foot space that could, when finished, serve as Chang's fine-dining flagship." He is about to open restaurants in Rockville and Arlington, alongside his existing Richmond and Charlottesville offerings that all showcase his "genuine, flame-throwing Sichuan cooking" considered to be some of the best Chinese food in the country. However, given that the word "peripatetic" is often used to describe him, we'll see what happens. (WaPo)
* FESTIVAL FESTIVALING: The National Cherry Blossom Festival will close this year with a new event, the Anacostia River Festival, on April 12 from noon to 4 pm at Anacostia Park. A joint effort by the 11th Street Bridge Project and the National Park Service, it is expected to feature boating, fishing workshops, tours of historic Anacostia, and "other unique programs to engage families with the environment."
* POOL CLUBBING: VIDA's Penthouse Pool Club opens on May 1. Assuming it has stopped snowing by then.
* AHEM: I've referenced this in a few unofficial places, but might as well just give it the full-on treatment. Recently Mr. JDLand was struck by a creative bolt of lightning (or perhaps was just tired of listening to me rant and rave), and presented me with the design at left. With tongue most firmly in cheek, I admit it cracks me up. If you would like to be among those making such a bold statement, the shirts are $12, available in S-M-L-XL. An in-person hand-off can probably even be arranged if you live within the general JDLand listening area. Shoot me a message if you are interested.
 

A Timeliness Upgrade to the Crime Report Box
I've checked off another long-time JDLand To Do item, this one being to improve the timeliness of the Crime Reports box down in the right-hand margin.
It used to be that the city offered the reports in an XML feed, but when that disappeared, I had to start going to the MPD reports page, go through a series of 15 clicks to download a usefully filtered file, open the file, and paste it into an import page I had created. Needless to say, this was not something I was interested in doing daily or even weekly.
But now I've built a new importer that parses a pasted version of the daily crime report sent out on the MPD-1D mailing list, stuffing each Near Southeast entry into my crime database.
This also means that I'm now getting additional "method" and "location" information that wasn't coming in the download from MPD.
I then went back through all non-theft from auto reports for the neighborhood back to the beginning of 2014 and updated the full database.
I also tweaked the display when you click on the red pushpins on both the homepage map and the archive database map.
I'll probably still need to go do the download from the MPD site every so often, to be sure that the data is complete, but at least now that's not the only way the data is coming in. And while I can't guarantee that this will always be updated daily, it's now a lot less likely to go three or four weeks between updates.
Comments (1)
More posts: crime, JDLand stuff
 

Tech Upgrade for the JDLand Neighborhood Development Map
For probably about six years now, I've been shielding my eyes and sticking my fingers in my ears and shouting LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA every time I looked at my poor excuse for a development map. It so desperately needed a makeover, but I never had the time, creative spark, or technological chops to turn it into anything like what I would want it to be, so I just left it alone, even during the big JDLand redesign a few months back. The map's information was accurate, at least!
But a few weeks ago I saw a blurb about Google's My Maps upgrade, now called Maps Engine Lite. You can draw lines and shapes! You can have layers (well, a few of them)! You can have Google as your maps base!
So I went off to play with it, and quickly decided that it could make a likeable enough successor to my original Web 0.1 map.
You can also always get to it by clicking on "View Full Map" on the mini-map at the top right of most JDLand pages, or the "Project Directory" link in the black menu bar.
It still isn't quite everything I dreamed of, but at least now you can zoom in, pan around, and filter the display by layers--if you only want to look at completed residential projects, or projects under construction, or projects not yet begun, or some combination thereof, click the little menu icon at top left and make your choices.
It may not be optimal for phones, and so I have to think about that for a while, but the big static list of projects is still available beneath the map if you are a words-and-not-pictures type of information ingestor.
I'll wager that my Parking Lots map will get migrated as well before Opening Day 2015.
And if you have any complaints with how it functions, feel free to let Google know!
Comments (10)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Down the Rabbit Hole: Redesigning JDLand, Finally
While I have appeared mostly AWOL from these parts for the past 10 days or so, I've actually been working harder on JDLand than I have in years, as out of nowhere the psychological energy arrived to drive a desperately needed redesign of the site's interior pages.
Click on one of the links on the map at the top right of the home page, or maybe go here or here or here, and you'll see what's going on:
* White space! Lots of it!
* Fewer words!
* A design that responds to your device--if you're on a big monitor, you'll see a rail of links to the latest news on a project. If you're on your phone, you'll see the basics (without having to drag the page around). With plenty of changes in between.
* For larger devices, the "peek" link at the left of the header box on project pages brings you a nifty (and not small) look back in time.
I've also been tinkering with the home page, but still have some things I want to do and so it's not quite as "responsive" as the interior pages. However, starting today you'll also see that clicking on photos in blog posts pops up a larger version, without having to load a new page.
I've done my best to test, but I'm sure there are configurations where this will all look pretty ghastly. If so, please let me know your browser and device, so I can troubleshoot.
There are also still a fair number of pages with the old design, and no doubt bugs aplenty, plus I may have been a bit too draconian in some of the content removal on the project pages. I'll be mopping up for a while yet.
It won't please everyone, of course, but it was definitely time for a change. And I've garnered a lot of enjoyment out of all of this work, which maybe isn't a feeling I've had related to JDLand very often in the past few years or so.
And now the In the Weeds discussion of the redesign, for those who might be interested:
It's safe to say that web design has changed just a smidge since I threw together my first pages about Near Southeast back in 2003, but since I've known for years exactly how enormous the task would be to implement a new design, I just closed my eyes to the aging look and feel and concentrated on, you know, the actual content.
This wasn't a matter of just changing some code at the top and bottom of a template somewhere--thanks to the rather, ahem, organic way that JDLand grew over the years, the code (and the site, really) had become embarrassingly dense and messy.
I've had to go into more than 100 pages and rip out the old web 1.0/table-based layout approach and replace it with boatloads of CSS. Which meant that pretty much every element on every one of those pages needed editing. (At least now this means the NEXT redesign will be simpler.)
And since I was editing every page, this also was finally my chance to move away from a navigation configuration that had worked well early on but had left me increasingly hamstrung, where, say, the Velocity and River Parc pages were both subsections of a Square 699N page. Now I've pretty much given every project its own page. But that meant building about 20 new pages.
I also found myself sort of arriving back full circle at where JDLand began a billion years ago--as a project about a changing neighborhood, with an eye toward being more of a historical document and less of a breathless minute-by-minute tracking of minutiae. (Though I admit the breathless minute-by-minute tracking was fun for a few years there!)
And even though I've barely come up for air while working on this, it's been a great process, and reminded me of how much my enjoyment of JDLand used to also come from back-end development, such as when I built the automated photo archive on the site, or the even more massive full archive I keep elsewhere.
There's more I need to think about--it may be time to go to larger photos across the site, but that's about 10,000 photos that would need to be re-saved at higher resolutions. So maybe not this week. But I admit that picking out the huge header photos--looking for the oldest ones of each particular site--made me want to think about a better way to have everyone be able to look at the large versions--while still protecting them from nefarious non-approved uses.
I'll still be tinkering plenty--for instance, the notion of going to a "lightbox" display of blog post photos came to me while I was starting to write this entry, so I had to scurry off and implement that before I could go any further. It never ends.
So, it's best to remember that, at heart, JDLand will always really be just my own history-photography-writing-web development hobby, which of course leaves the site much more vulnerable to my mercurial whims than a real business would ever be. But that's how I roll.
And, who knows, maybe someday another flash of sudden psychological energy will strike at the actual blogging portion of JDLand....
Comments (12)
More posts: JDLand stuff
 

Tuesday Tidbits: Beta Edition
* RESULTS: Last week I mentioned how concerned parents and neighbors were organizing a drive to call David Catania's office on May 1 to impress upon him the importance of opening Van Ness Elementary as scheduled in 2015. It didn't even take until the end of the day to get results, as evidenced by this quote sent to the Van Ness Parents Group from Catania's office: "[Councilmember Catania] supports the on-time opening and modernization of Van Ness. And while the Committee does not finalize and markup its budget until May 15th, it is the Councilmember’s intention to keep Van Ness’ $15 million FY15 renovation in the budget as proposed. Thank you again for your hard work and advocacy!"
* AWARDS: The US Green Building Council has officially awarded LEED Gold status to Canal Park, thanks to its sustainable development design that includes electric car charging stations, an extensive storm water collection and reuse system, as well as tree boxes and bio swales that provide filtration for street-level runoff surrounding the park.
* SPOTLIGHTS: The spring edition of the 11th Street Bridges newsletter is out, without any actual news on the project but instead spotlighting the small and local businesses that have partnered with DDOT on the project.
* TWEEPING: If you are wanting to keep up with the ever-growing lineup of nearby businesses and organizations, feel free to bookmark my Near Southeast Businesses Twitter list, as an easy way to quickly scan their latest missives in one spot.
* PROPERTY FOR SALE!: Over the years I've had a lot of people contact me desperate for leads on available property. I finally have acres of empty land to offer, but the commute might be a bit rough.
* BETA TO THE MAX: I've been down the rabbit hole over the past few days, as I have finally begun to redesign the interior pages of JDLand, which have needed a refresh since about 2006. (I already mentioned my first cut at redesigning the home page.)
It's a pretty mammoth undertaking, and will take a while to implement, but if you want to see an early prototype of what I'm going for, you can look at the Community Center page, or the Square 701 page, or the Akridge Half Street page, or my Past News page for Yards Parcel A. Note that some stuff will be broken as of now, but the pages do respond to different screen sizes, which also means that the non-blog portion of the site should become much more mobile friendly. As of now it's probably a bit screwy in older browsers, but should be okay if you're using up-to-date Chrome, Firefox, or IE. And the irony isn't lost on me that I haven't been posting much work on JDLand over the past few days because I've been working so much on JDLand.
 
98 Posts:
Go to Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10




                  © Copyright 2024 JD.