Purpose-Built Community Platform
Mendocino Today
A mobile-first community directory for Mendocino County — one current place for what's open and on.
Local information for Mendocino County lived everywhere and nowhere: events on flyers, dining and galleries scattered across separate business pages, community services with no current index at all. Visitors and locals had no single, phone-friendly place to find what's open and on — and the people running events, restaurants, and rentals had no easy way to get in front of that audience.
The problem
A county's worth of local knowledge, fragmented across a dozen surfaces. A flyer in a coffee shop, a post in a Facebook group, a restaurant's own page that may or may not be current. To find out what was happening this weekend you had to already know where to look. And the listings problem cuts both ways: a gallery opening or a vacation rental had nowhere to be listed that locals actually checked. The information existed. There was just no commons.
What we built
A mobile-first community directory at mendocinotoday.com that pulls the county into one browsable index: Events, Restaurants, Galleries, Services, Stay, and Housing & Real Estate, plus a Community Stories section for longer local posts. Anyone can browse free, with no account.
The part that makes it a commons rather than a publication: a public "Add listing" flow. Businesses, organizers, and locals submit their own entries directly instead of everything being sourced and typed in by hand. A daily scraper also gathers events and stories from around the county so the index fills itself between submissions.
Nothing publishes by accident
An open submission flow only works if it stays trustworthy, so the core rule is simple: nothing goes live on its own. Every submission, and everything the scraper pulls in, lands in one review queue where a team of local reviewers approves, edits, or rejects it before the public ever sees it — one shared screen, one pass through the day's new entries. The boundary isn't just the interface, either: the database itself only ever serves approved rows to the public, so an un-reviewed listing can't slip through even by accident.
What changed
Mendocino County has one current, phone-friendly place to find what's open and on, kept full by the community rather than sourced and typed in by hand. A team of locals from the community runs it from a password-protected admin — the review queue, categories, scraper sources, and traffic — all in plain language, no technical background needed. Listings arrive on their own; the daily work is a quick yes or no on what's new.
“One place for what's open and on. Filled by the community, kept honest by a team of locals.”
Mendocino Today is live at mendocinotoday.com