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About Portland Wild

Hi, I'm Jeff Reifman, the concept for Portland Wild emerged to me from walks around the Portland area and seeing so many beautiful trees and discovering the Heritage Tree program. I thought there should be a photo-driven map that made it easier to find these trees. Gradually, I realized there should be a map for murals too. If not for podcast 99percentinvisible my awareness for the value of data collection and legacy might not have been as active for me.

As I began preparations, I found Matt Blair at Elsewise Media had already built PDXTrees, a now defunct iOS app, and an iOS app for murals, Public Art PDX (still active!). Matt has been incredibly gracious, sharing data and encouraging me to offer a map solution for the public internet, an idea he had hoped to build one day. I'm touched by his openness to supporting a "competitive" solution. Thank you Matt.

Portland Wild is built with the Yii Framework for PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery and the Google Maps API. Check out my tutorial series on the Yii Framework at Tuts+.

Dedications

Portland Wild is dedicated to my street friends Daniel, Millie and Leroy and to my friend Jim Feldmann, RIP.

It's also dedicated to Little Free Library Founder and Executive Director Todd H. Bols (pdf) who passed away October 18th, 2018 from pancreatic cancer.

Acknowledgements

I greatly appreciate all of these folks for their support, encouragement and feedings:

• Matt Blair at Elsewise Media, creator of the iOS Public Art PDX, RIP PDXTrees, for sharing his data, knowledge and gracious encouragement.
• The sage of the Heritage Trees, incipient nonagenarian Dr. Phyllis Reynolds for sharing her Heritage Tree photo collection and for Lyndsay Dyk at Timber Press for helping me find her. You can purchase the current version of Trees of Greater Portland from Powells.
• Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry, the Heritage Tree program and esp. Gina Dake.
• Regional Art & Culture Council (RACC) esp. Danielle Davis.
• Little Free Library for their amazing inspiring efforts and sharing their data.
• Sarah Iannarone my go to expert on navigating Portland and getting connected.
• The staff at Sweet Hereafter for keeping my vegan pretzel burger level normal, the staff at the Elevator Cafe for keeping my caffeine properly elevatored and to Olivia at Nourish Northwest for helping me manage my vegan pretzel burgers.

About Jeff Reifman

I'm a writer, activist and technologist. My recent projects include the Black Women in Politics database, America Possible and Meeting Planner. Learn more about me at my website or follow me @reifman.