Thanks to you, our new site will be even better than we had hoped.  Too bad Google almost spoiled the big reveal...

We've gotten a lot of feedback about our new classifieds site in the past couple of days.  Now that Friday has arrived, however, the deluge has begun. 

It's the day before the weekend, when the most important thing on many people's minds is "where are the garage sales in my neighborhood?"  Our old site allowed you to sort them by zip code, and see a nice ordered list that you could print out and plan your day with. 

The new site was SUPPOSED to display all of the garage sales in a cool, printable, graphical map (thank you, Google, for this among many other blessings).  Well, as luck and software vendors would have it, this function wasn't up in time for our launch.  We are working with McClatchy Interactive and our vendor to fix this problem ASAP.

So to all of you avid yard sailors - please accept my humble apologies about this.  You WILL have a useful tool to plan your weekends by; it just may take us a few days to get the bugs out of it. 

Despite the advent of several very popular classified advertising websites which shall remain nameless here, the newspaper classified site is still going strong.

Ours has been going strong for about 3 years now.  It's gotten a bit creaky, so we're launching a new one tomorrow.  Fortunately, our sister company McClatchy Interactive built the technology for it, using our existing site as a model for the features and layout.  (Also, one of our original web designers went to work for MI two years ago, and was instrumental in designing it.)

It's a bittersweet launch.  We built the current site using PHP, the then-state-of-the-art programming framework, and it's been chugging along like a faithful old steam engine.  On the other hand, with the new site, there will be bells and whistles like:

• Google mapping for garage sales
• The ability to drill down into search results by meta-info (like how many days old the ad is)
• A nice solid all-CSS template.

Check it out tomorrow - and place an ad today!