How these articles get written
This page exists because you should be able to check. Every article on this blog carries a name, a date and a telephone number, and this is the account of what stands behind them.
Who writes them
Larry Trimboli, who owns Sierra Log & Timber, designs the homes and mills the cedar they are built from. He has done it since 1994. Where somebody else at the mill is the person who knows, the article says so and carries their name instead.
There are no ghostwriters and there is no content farm. A byline here is a claim that the person named did the work described, and it is a claim we are happy to be rung up about.
Where the facts come from
Before an article is written, the person who knows the subject is interviewed about it, one question at a time, and the answers are kept. Every number in a finished article has to appear in that transcript or in a source listed on the article itself. An article that cannot pass that check does not get published.
Photographs are the family's or the mill's own, credited where they come from. We do not buy stock photography of somebody else's house and present it as a Sierra build.
How AI is used, plainly
The facts, the names, the numbers and the events come from the interview. They exist in one person's head and in no training data.
A language model may be used to turn that transcript into sentences: structure, connective prose, a first draft of the summary at the top. Larry reads and edits whatever comes back, and the personal paragraphs are typed by him rather than generated. Nothing reaches this site without a person reading it and pressing publish, and publishing is a separate press from approving a draft.
If that ever changes, this page changes first.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than from a search engine. Ring the mill and ask for Larry.
When an article changes in substance, the change date on it changes with it. Dates on this site are not touched to make old work look new: an article that has not been edited keeps the date it was published, and the sitemap says the same thing to a crawler that the page says to you.
What we link to
Links inside an article go to our own properties (the plan shop, the project gallery, the landowner resource directory and the pre-construction planner) or to a source listed on the article with one line saying what it supports. We do not link to other people's plan catalogues from our own blog, which is something this site used to do and does not do any more.
Reaching us
The mill is in Chico, California, and the number below is the one on every article: (530) 899-0680. Ask for Larry.