Let me get the important bit out of the way first, because I know some of you will only read the first paragraph. Dayboro.au stays. The weather stays on dayboro.au. The events stay on dayboro.au. The Dayboro Lions Business Directory stays the authority on local businesses and services, we host it for the Lions free of charge, and we will keep doing that for as long as we can afford it. That will not change. Ever. Right, now the long version.

It started with lyndhurst-hill.info

The weather station up here on Lyndhurst Hill has been logging since 2004, and in those early days it had its own little site at lyndhurst-hill.info. The community side, the business directory and the events, lived separately on mydayboro.com from 2005. Anyone who has been in town long enough will remember those addresses. Over the years it all came together on dayboro.au, which was shorter, more Australian, and easier to say over the fence.

Then there is dayboro.com, which deserves its own paragraph. That domain belonged to the local hardware back in the day, then it changed hands, and its last life was a local business and events directory that only lasted a few short years. Today it sits with a broker, for sale at 7,499 US dollars, which is money we will never pay for a domain name. And it was far from the only one. I have watched plenty of directories and events calendars for this town come and go. They all leave once they work out the same thing: there is no money to be made here, only expenses to be paid. The cost of running and managing this stuff never stops, and it all adds up. Every one of those attempts took local businesses with it when it folded, and that mattered for what came next.

The site that did everything

Dayboro.au grew the way a shed grows. You start with a slab and a roof, then every year you bolt something on the side. Weather came first, because that is my thing. Then the events calendar. Then the business directory with the Lions. Then the gardening tools, the vegetable prices, the forecast accuracy pages, the reports, the shop with the weather cartoons. None of it was planned as one product. Each bit got built because someone in town asked for it.

The result is a site I love and a site that is, honestly, complicated. There is close to twenty years of history in there. If you know where everything is, it is a goldmine. If you landed on it yesterday looking for a plumber, it is a maze with a weather station in the middle.

The complexity caused a very specific problem: nobody coudl tell which button belongs to which job. Subscribing on dayboro.au gets you the weather reports, the events updates and the rest, and those subscriptions are the income stream that keeps all of this running. That has not changed and we very much still want you to subscribe there. But people who came for a business listing or a market date got lost on the way, and the job that pays the bills was buried under five other jobs.

The Dayboro Lions Business Directory, the bit that never moves

Since 2017 we have partnered with the Dayboro Lions Club to run the old paper business directory online. The directory has been part of local commerce since its APEX days, and putting it on internet was about keeping that going, not replacing it. We provide the hosting and the tech completely free of charge to the Lions, because the directory supports their fundraising, and their fundraising supports the town.

So let me be very clear abotu this part, because it is the part I care most about. The Dayboro Lions Business Directory is and will remain the authority on local businesses and services in Dayboro. If you run a business here and you want to be found online, that is your first port of call. Talk to the Lions. Every business in the Lions directory gets listed on every Dayboro site and app we build, for free. All of them. That will not change either.

Right now the register holds 133 local listings across 84 categories, and you can browse it two ways: the full directory pages on dayboro.au, or the fast lookup at dayborodirectory.com, which reads straight from the same register and syncs itself through the day. Fair warning on that second one, it is a placeholder for now, just the full list of Lions directory businesses in a plain format. It will get a proper facelift later.

Browse the Lions directory Quick lookup

GardenBuddy moved out first

The gardening side was the first thing to get its own address. What started as a what to plant page on dayboro.au turned into a full garden planner with bed layouts, sowing dates for your climate zone, live vegetable prices and harvest tracking. At that point it was not really a Dayboro page any more, it worked for gardens anywhere in Australia, so it moved to gardenbuddy.au and got its own mascot, Buddy the Sprout.

That move taught us the lesson that shaped everything since: one site, one job. GardenBuddy does gardens. It does not do weather warnings or business listings, and because of that, anyone who lands on it understands it in about five seconds. Nobody has ever emailed me confused about what GardenBuddy is for.

Visit gardenbuddy.au

So why LocalBuddy, and why dayboro.localbuddy.au?

Two reasons, and they arrived at the same time.

First, the requests. Once dayboro.com disappeared, we started getting asked, over and over, by businesses outside Dayboro whether they could join the Dayboro Lions directory. Samford businesses. Mount Mee businesses. The answer had to be no, because the Lions directory is Dayboro's register and it needs to stay that, or it stops meaning anything. But the most of those requests were reasonable. Those towns lost their online noticeboard the same way we nearly did. Telling them "no, and there is nothing else" felt wrong.

Second, the confusion I mentioned earlier. Dayboro.au does six jobs and people kept getting lost between them. The honest fix was not another bolt on the side of the shed. It was a separate, simple site with exactly one function: the online brochure for the town.

That is LocalBuddy. It is a platform where a community, any community, gets its own space with events, a business directory view, news, a marketplace and community messaging, the same way you would use a Facebook group but on ground the community controls, with no ads sold over the top of it. A community on LocalBuddy can be a town like Dayboro, a garden club, or just your extended family organising Christmas. The functionality is designed for communication and advertising, and that is all it does.

Dayboro.localbuddy.au is simply Dayboro's community on that platform. It shows the same Lions businesses, the same events, and the same weather from the hill, presented as a straightforward brochure anyone can navigate on the first visit. I said earlier it has one function. Actually, looking at it now, it has two: the brochure, and the messaging. But both serve the same idea, which is a simple front door for the town.

Other communities can now create their own space on localbuddy.au too, and the businesses we had to turn away finally have somewhere to go that we can stand behind. It also solves a smaller local problem: a Dayboro business that missed the window for the current Lions directory does not have to sit out the year. It can add its listing on dayboro.localbuddy.au straight away, and join the Lions directory at the next opportunity.

Visit dayboro.localbuddy.au See localbuddy.au

The Dayboro app is not going anywhere either

Dayborobuddy.au and app.dayboro.au are the same thing, the Dayboro Buddy app. It is still THE app for keeping up with the town: the weather, what is on, which businesses are open, warnings the moment the Bureau issues them. It is in the process of being updated right now, and once that lands it will pull its feed from both dayboro.au and dayboro.localbuddy.au, so whichever site something gets posted on, the app shows it. Free, as it always has been.

We will keep expanding it. If anything, the restructure makes the app better, because it now has two clean sources instead of one complicated one.

Open the Dayboro app

And then a dog walked in

The newest one is muttmates.au, and it exists because of the dog park. If you have ever stood at an empty park wondering whether anyone is coming, or arrived to find the one dog yours does not get along with, you know the problem. Muttmates answers one question: who's at the park? You add your mutt, pick your home park, post when you are heading down, and see who else is going. Dayboro Dog Park is on it, along with parks in the wider area.

It is the one function idea again, applied to dogs rather then businesses. We will eventually add more parks as people ask for them.

Visit muttmates.au

Who is behind all this

There is a small team behind the buddy sites and dayboro.au now, which is why the pace has picked up. An artist who runs her own gallery site looks after the creative side. A community minded bloke from the Samford side keeps us honest on what neighbouring towns actually need. Our technical one keeps the servers alive, and the kids, who are somehow adults now, chip in when we rope them into it. And yes, we lean heavily on AI for the development. The AI writes the code, which is the dumb work, and the people decide what gets built, for whom, and why. I am comfortable with that split. The weather station is still a real station on a real hill, the Lions are still real people folding real raffle tickets, and no AI has ever picked up dog poo at the park.

The map, so you can stop reading

Straight answers

See you at the park, or on the hill.