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A friend recently showed me a local site called “Urban Edibles” that bills itself as “a community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR.” It’s a fantastic combination of ideology and technical functionality where you can easily find free fruit, vegetables, herbs, berries and so on. The site is equally geared towards people looking for food and those posting sources of edibles, making it easy to submit and search, either by category or location. The authors have taken care not to encourage people to abuse the information and you will find warning notes all over the site like “The status of this source is unknown. Ask before you pick!”

Currently the database is not extensive, it is in the process of being built, but it is clearly a fun project for those involved. Urban Edibles employs a variety of technologies including a very active wiki with recipes, resources and information on identifying plants, and discovering what is in season. Perhaps most impressive is the “Browse by Category” section which uses some nice Ajax and javascript animation effects (using the Prototype Library), and then ties into a link to Google Maps.

This is not the sort of website that will see huge traffic but will likely see some repeat visitors who completely fall in love with it. Sites like this make me glad to be a Web developer in Portland, Oregon. There are great ideas everywhere with folks willing to make them real.

KGW ran a story on Urban Edibles as well:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Cool Sites, Social Media, Tech Ramblings, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.