Some websites begin with a business plan. Across Pittsburgh began because I kept finding things about Pittsburgh that I wanted to write about. 

A restaurant worth trying. A neighborhood with an interesting story. A high school football game on a Friday night. An old place somebody remembers that isn't there anymore. Something happening this weekend that might be worth getting out of the house for.

Eventually, all of those things needed a home of their own.

Across Pittsburgh is that home.

It's one of the independent web properties developed and supported through Scratch Writing Studio. Although it lives within the larger ScratchWriting.com ecosystem, Across Pittsburgh is designed to function as its own publication—with its own identity, audience, editorial structure, and growing archive of Pittsburgh content.

Pittsburgh, From Where I Sit

I don't want Across Pittsburgh to be an exhaustive directory of everything happening within fifty miles of the Point. There are already plenty of websites trying to do that.

I'm more interested in curation and storytelling.

The site focuses on five broad areas: Food & Drink, Things to Do, Places & Community, Shopping & Services, and Sports. That gives me plenty of room to write about what is happening around Pittsburgh while also preserving the stories, places, traditions, and memories that make the region interesting in the first place.

A useful weekend guide can live beside a story about a long-gone amusement park. A restaurant feature can sit alongside high school football photographs. A neighborhood guide might lead to some obscure piece of Pittsburgh history that sends me down a rabbit hole for an afternoon.

That's pretty much the idea.

I want Across Pittsburgh to be useful enough to bookmark and entertaining enough to follow.

A Publication With a Life of Its Own

Across Pittsburgh also represents an interesting part of how I think about Scratch Writing.

Not everything I create needs to carry the Scratch Writing name prominently or feel like an extension of my books. Sometimes an idea grows large enough that it deserves its own identity.

Across Pittsburgh has done that.

It has its own readers and social audience, particularly through Facebook, where local photographs, sports, memories, and Pittsburgh stories have sometimes reached tens of thousands of people well beyond those already following the page.

That audience has helped clarify what the site can become: not simply another section of Scratch Writing, but a genuine Pittsburgh lifestyle and culture publication built around local curiosity.

Scratch Writing Studio remains the workshop behind it—the place where I develop the site's structure, design, publishing systems, visual identity, and editorial machinery.

Where the Real World Meets the Fictional One

There's also one connection to the larger Scratch Writing universe that I particularly enjoy.

Pittsburgh is an important part of my fiction, especially The Midas Files. Real restaurants, neighborhoods, roads, landmarks, and pieces of local history occasionally find their way into those stories.

That creates some fun possibilities.

An Across Pittsburgh article might explore a real location that readers have encountered in a Midas Files chapter. A Bingham's Notebook article might point readers in the opposite direction to learn about the actual Pittsburgh place behind a scene.

Neither site has to become an advertisement for the other. They're simply two different ways of exploring a place that has influenced much of what I create.

Real Pittsburgh can occasionally bump into fictional Pittsburgh.

I rather like that.

Built in the Studio

From a Scratch Writing Studio perspective, Across Pittsburgh is also an ongoing web-development project.

It's a place where I can continue refining Joomla publishing workflows, category architecture, tagging, responsive design, social-media integration, recurring editorial features, and ways of managing an increasingly large archive without losing the personality that made the project interesting in the first place.

In that sense, Across Pittsburgh is both a publication and a laboratory.

The finished site belongs to its readers.

But behind the scenes, its machinery is very much being built here in Scratch Writing Studio.