Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Behind-the-Scenes”
The Case of the Missing Map Pins
We started with a mystery.
The map on our site was blank — no pins, no interactivity, just a lonely placeholder where a lively directory of farmers markets used to be. Somewhere along the way, after restructuring the repo and switching branches, the data that powered the map had vanished.
Our goal was clear: bring the map back to life.
Step 1: Following the Breadcrumbs
The first thing we discovered was that the data folder was empty. The map had been reading from a local markets.json file, and that file no longer existed. No wonder the pins were gone.
We went live - A static site and a few gremlins
Today Fresh Local Harvest officially moved into its new home at freshlocalharvest.org. It’s fast, clean, and blissfully quiet—no servers to baby, no mystery processes humming at 3 a.m. Just a static site that gets out of the way so we can focus on the market data and the stories behind it.
Was it perfectly smooth? Of course not. But we had an extra brain in the room to keep things calm when the buttons hid and the acronyms started shouting.
Chasing Clean Data (and Catching Most of It)
Data hunts rarely start glamorous. Ours began with a simple question: where do we find a reliable, national list of farmers markets? Then came spreadsheets, acronyms, and a lot of “huh, that’s interesting.”
The short version
We sourced a national directory, normalized it into a clean, portable database, added guardrails for trust, and exposed it via an API that’s fast enough for maps and simple enough for people. Not perfect yet—but solid, explainable, and built to improve.