Yard Sale Map

Organizing a neighborhood yard sale? Put every seller on a map that updates itself from your sign-up form. Free, and yours to keep.

You've got a sign-up form, a spreadsheet filling up with addresses, and a Saturday coming. Somewhere in there, somebody has to turn that list into something a visitor can actually use to find forty garages.

That's this. Neighbors sign up through your Google Form, and the map draws itself. Nobody retypes addresses, nobody drags pins around, and when someone signs up on Friday night they're on the map on Friday night.

What your neighbors see

A map of the neighborhood with a pin on every sale, a list of who's selling what, and a search box that filters both at once. Somebody hunting for a bike finds the three people selling bikes. It works on a phone, which is where almost everyone will open it.

For a two-day sale, sellers pick their days, and visitors see only the sales happening the day they're out walking.

What it costs you

Nothing. There's no per-sale fee and no account to create, for you or for your neighbors.

It runs on your own website, reading from a spreadsheet you own. Your neighbors' addresses stay in your Google account and nobody else's, which matters more than it sounds like when you're the person who asked them to hand those addresses over.

Getting it running

About twenty minutes, mostly clicking around in Google to connect your form, plus one short snippet to paste into a page at the end. If your association has someone who manages the website, that snippet is the only part they need from you.

Everything is written up here: github.com/sparkstonepdx/yardsale-map.

Where it came from

I'm co-chair of the North Tabor Neighborhood Association in Portland, and I built the first version for our own sale because we needed one. Three other neighborhoods asked to borrow it, which is why it exists as something you can run yourself. That's the whole story, including the part where the first version broke the night before the sale.

Grab it, and reach out if you get stuck. I'll help you get it standing.

Is there a version of this at your work?

The map started because a volunteer was retyping addresses by hand every spring. Most of the work I do for Portland businesses starts the same way: one process everyone puts up with because there's no obvious fix. If something at your office looks like that, I'm happy to take a look at it.

This remind you of a problem you've been dealing with?

I'd be happy to discuss it with you and see if it's something we could turn into a solution.