We've made a small but useful improvement to the maps on your block and neighborhood pages.

On those pages, we display news items both in a list, and as clusters on a map. The list lets you see items grouped by their type and in a timeline, while the map lets you see where they are in relation to each other geographically.

One drawback to the current setup has been that there’s no connection between the two: if you are interested in a particular news item in the list and want to see where it is on the map, you have to click on each of the map markers — and page through a list if the marker is a cluster of items — until you find the one that matches your item. And it doesn’t work very efficiently in reverse, either: you’d have to look back and forth between the two to find an item in the list that you’ve clicked on on the map.

Now you can click on the location string (the gray box to the right of a news item in the list) and it will select that item’s marker on the map. You can also start by clicking on a marker on the map, and its news item in the list will be highlighted by a little orange marker next to the location string. This works even if you are paging through a group of items in a map marker popup.

Balancing a list display and a map display of the same set of information is a challenge we enjoy, and there are many ways to tackle it. We’d love to hear what you think about the way we chose here. Keep sending those emails to feedback at everyblock dot com.