Hi, I'm Maddie.
I build software on my own, in Osceola County, most of the day, most days. This is one of about twenty things I've made. It's the only one that grades anybody.
It started with something small and stupid: I wanted to know whether the place I was about to eat at had ever been written up, and there was no way to find out that didn't involve a government portal, a licence number I didn't have, and a page of citation codes I couldn't read. The information was right there, paid for by the public, and effectively unreadable. That annoyed me enough to build this.
Three things, and everything else on the site follows from them.
- The inspector's words go up untouched. Typos, missing full stops, all of it. The moment I tidy a sentence I've become the author of a record I didn't write, and the whole thing stops being evidence and starts being my opinion.
- The good ones get as much room as the bad ones. Sites like this are usually a pillory — find the worst kitchen, point at it, collect the clicks. But somebody passing inspection after inspection with nothing found is doing something genuinely hard, every day, and nobody anywhere tells them so. Now something does.
- Nobody can pay me anything. Not to come off the site, not to move a grade, not to stay out of a ranking, not to get into one. I will be offered it. The answer is no, and it will still be no in five years when this is bigger.
Nothing, and it never will. No ads, no tracking, no analytics watching what you look up, no account, no newsletter you have to escape from. The one email exists because people asked for it and it goes out at most weekly, only when something actually happened near you.
The whole dataset is free to download too. It came from public records; it goes back out as public records. If somebody builds something better than this with it, good.
Tell me. I'd rather hear it from you than not know. corrections@eatsafelyinflorida.com, or the corrections page if you want to know how I check it first. I read all of it. I'm one person, so give me a few days.
Everything I make comes out under Tanooki Studios. Different problems, same one-woman operation, same refusal to sell anybody's attention on.
I'm not on any social media and I'm not going to be, so this page is the whole of it. If you want to say something, email works.