Greg Hartnett

I don’t often post about work stuff here, and almost never do I write about stuff in order to promote, but..

We officially brought BOTW Local to beta today, and I’m pretty psyched about it. We have spent the better portion of two years going crazy and screwing up other deadlines to get this out. We grossly underestimated the amount of work that would go into it, and we’re nowhere near “finished”.

The site is huge - like 16.5 million pages. So in an effort to not scare the hell out of the spiders we’re doing a somewhat slow roll out. Most of the site still contains “no-spider” tags. Thus far, we have only introduced the spiders to the following markets: Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago and Austin. As we feel comfortable with the indexing and crawl rate of each market introduced, we introduce more. So far so good with tens of thousands of pages indexed, and many many pages ranking very well. More cities coming soon.

So all in all, it’s been a hell of a build. There’s still plenty more build to do with more than a few holes that need filling. And after that comes the really tough part - marketing and monetization. Oh the fun of new projects

I’d encourage any business owners to claim your business - it’s free with the JumpStart page. The user account is a little unpolished, and the entire sign up process is in the final stages of a makeover, but the business pages work, and they’re free.

If you find something that sucks, let me know.

I hope that this offering proves to be as successful as we plan, and that you find it to be a useful resource for your local information needs.

Yeah. Me. And I’m feeling really pissy about it. Hopefully next week is better.

*Update* - A couple of weeks in and I’m feeling pretty groovy. I definitely feel markedly better than at the time of the original posting.