This is the boring stuff, click above for the directories. I need to figure out a proper home page.
The IMP (Independent Merchant Project) was created in Kingston, Ontario by Matt Shepherd, using code and support by Joe Crawford. The IMP is a free, lightning-fast, low-footprint website that highlights local, independent businesses to keep money in communities. IMP code and training (and even hosting, if needed) is free to anyone who wants to set up an IMP in their own community! Just visit our Super Secret Free IMP page.
A few future expansions for this project will include...
It might be cheaper to buy from a mega-chain, or support a near-monopoly. But buying local means keeping your money in the community. Sure, you can save a few bucks on a burger from a chain restaurant, or shave a dollar off something ordering from Amazon. But that doesn't do you much good in a city with no services, kids with nothing to do, and neighbours who are out of work because all the money has gone into some billionaire's offshore tax haven. Buying local means doing business with people you trust, and keeping our local economy vibrant, our neighbours working, and our cities and towns thriving.
It might be free to put a page up on Facebook, but the real cost is that your data -- and that of your customers -- is being harvested and sold to advertisers. Having your own website is free (just ask!) and keeps your information available to people that choose not to opt into online ecosystems that spread misinformation, radicalize people with incensing algorithms, and ultimately funnel more and more of our attention and time to international consortiums.
Take it from the person who did a lot of searching to assemble these resources: search engines, and mega-corps like Yelp, aren't here to help. They're here to promote corporations that pay to play, and are more and more aggressive about hiding local small players in favour of e-retailers and multinationals. Artificial intelligence is even worse; scraping only the sites it's instructed to by its owners, delivering hallucinations and out-of-date results, and on a direct track to being monetized just like search and social media have been. It's environmentally ruinous and getting worse by the day.
The Kingston IMP is >100kb -- this entire site takes less bandwidth to host and run than a single picture on Instagram. It's human-curated, and human-updated. No slop, no hallucinations, no pay-to-play. Saying it's the last honest corner of the Internet is a bit overblown, but...
Nobody really talks about the lingering effects of two and a half REALLY GODDAMN WEIRD years. Isolation mandates. Masking. Things being open then closed then open then semi-open then open but you have to dip your whole body in sanitizer. Society is a bit in "delivery hangover," and it's really important that we all collectively get out of the fuckin' house and see human beings when we pick up our food orders and buy things. Look folks in the eye. Smile. Say hi. INTERACT with the people that make our food, that stock our shelves, that physically make the things we use.
People can solve these problems by being locally active and willing to put in minimal elbow grease. This whole site, from concept to coding, is about a 40-hour project spread over a few months. With the code and approach being available for free for anyone who wants to replicate it, putting together an instance for your town, neighbourhood or small city is a 10-12 hour project you can tackle at your own pace. The code is so simple that updating it is a snap. It's so low-footprint that using it 100 times takes fewer resources than browsing Facebook for 10 minutes.
Pay-to-play business listings are just another flavour of the problems that arise with social media, Yelp, Google Reviews, etc. And while there are great things happening at local government levels and things like Chambers of Commerce, at the end of the day they answer to the people with the money, not the local vendors. If the owner of a five-location McDonald's chain is the president of your local Business Improvement Association, you're not going to see solutions from there. You gotta get money out of the mix.
This site is built on "old Internet" principles: humans using HTML, CSS, and a smidge of JavaScript to do neat stuff to help each other out. Before the crushing dominance of social media, before billionaires ran everything, the web was a scrappy, innovative place that did more to connect humans than divide them. The IMP is a call back to the days of the useful Web: human-centric, focused on function. We're here to help!