SubscribeMy Django Setup
April 7, 2010 at 2:56 p.m.
I picked up my old MacBook from the Apple Store with a new, bigger, and spotless, hard drive, with a fresh install of Leopard.
Time consuming as it is to set up a computer from scratch, it's actually something I'd been meaning to do. The death of my old hard drive just forced me to do so sooner, and a little less gently than I might have liked. But it is nice starting from scratch.
With that in mind, I decided I should set up my development environment the Right Way: with code sandboxed as much as possible ...
Happy Thanksgiving
November 26, 2009 at 9:11 a.m.
I have been neglecting this blog of late, so here's a quick list of things for which I am thankful. This year has treated me well, and I am grateful, first, to all the people who have helped make that happen.
My fiance is wonderful, and amazing, and I love her. What can I say? I lucked out here. I'm getting married next year and that makes me happy in ways I can't put into words. Thanks, Laura.
Mom, Dad, Katie, Nick, Mike. Getting married brings up all kinds of opportunities to gripe about the family. But ...
Art blogging on Art Beat about art bloggers
August 8, 2009 at 12:58 p.m.
I had the pleasure of talking to Scott Rosenberg earlier this month about his book Say Everything for the NewsHour's Art Beat blog. The book is billed as a history of blogging, and it tells that story admirably. We also got to talk a bit about why blogging works so well on the web and how it differs from other literary forms. Read that post here.
That conversation spawned a follow-up post in which I interviewed three art bloggers about how the medium has affected their message.
For example, here's Lisa Fung, arts editor for the LA Times ...
Squished grapes and sunken starfighters
July 21, 2009 at 10:30 p.m.
Listen to Yoda and Mr. Miyagi: Do, or do not, or be a squished grape. English grammar is less important.
Have more fun
July 6, 2009 at 5:55 p.m.
Before she flew to Russia ahead of Barack Obama's trip there this week, someone gave Margaret Warner an HD Flip Cam to shoot a few video diaries for the web. They came out a little bouncy, not quite the quality we'd get from more serious video equipment and the sound, while way better than I would have expected, could still be a bit clearer.
But the big thing I see in this video, and what I really like about it, is a reporter having fun.
Do something.
June 16, 2009 at 4:28 p.m.
Alex said this in a recent email, and it's worth repeating:
In the end, I think, doing something is what's really important. There can be a lot of wanking over platforms, implementation, topics or whatever. But doing something, and including people, being open in approach, is probably the most important thing to do, I think, and once the ball's rolling, let it roll in they way it wants to.
Remember that when meetings multiply, when platform wars become software crusades, when your computer does things that cause you to swear in Portuguese and Chinese and Italian.
Doing ...
Beyond publishing
June 1, 2009 at 9:26 p.m.
Rebuilding my blog in Django means I can do more than just publish posts.
Imagine...news on your computer
February 9, 2009 at 1:46 a.m.
It's not as far fetched as you might imagine:
This video has been making the rounds, but I had to post it because--aside from being broadcast the year I was born--it says something about the way news consumption has changed in my lifetime.
I hear some version of the lead in on this piece pretty regularly from members of my parents' generation: "I just can't imagine sitting down with my coffee and a computer screen. I like the feel of the paper." Funny, that's exactly how I read the news, and discuss it, and create it.
A ...
PBS Newshour Online
January 26, 2009 at 11:37 p.m.
Funny story: Back in October, I started building a little Django-powered web app that ultimately became Tools for News. I'm up coding one Friday night (my girlfriend was in Guatemala at the time; I'm not THAT much of a nerd) and send out this tweet:
A few minutes later, this direct message appears in my inbox:eyeseast: The little journalists' toolkit I mentioned yesterday is coming together. A few good folks are testing it now. Going to try adding comments. Oct 11, 2008 05:37 AM GMT
NewsHour Howdy there. We're digging the toolkit for journos ...
Remembering Deep Throat and the man in the shadows
January 17, 2009 at 2:35 a.m.
Friends, family and admirers of W. Mark Felt, better known to the public as Deep Throat, remembered the late FBI agent today as a man who lived his fundamental beliefs of "truth, justice and service."
"Action is character," former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (now an editor there) said of his late friend and mentor.
This was a memorial for the man known as Deep Throat, the G-man who arranged secret meetings at an underground parking garage with Woodward as the Watergate cover up unfolded, much more than it was for Mark Felt, who died at 95 in his daughter ...
Stuff to learn in 2009
January 7, 2009 at 1:20 a.m.
Just going to write all this down so I don't forget. Could call it "resolutions" but that whole mindset seems designed to produce regret come December. Let's just make this a to-learn/to-do list:
GeoDjango
With Tools for News up and running and RedFence 2.0 almost there, I feel like I've got a good enough grasp of Django to try out the GIS branch. I've got a subdomain for it set up and a couple project ideas to play with. No promises that anything interesting will happen there, but it's there.JavaScript
I have ...Finding a local news feed
December 20, 2008 at 4:20 a.m.
My next little side project is going to involve parsing feeds. I'm tired of wading through hideous newspaper.coms trying to find a certain story, or stories about a certain area, without having to avoid national news I've read elsewhere, or bits about towns I'll never visit.
Andrew Meyer has been having the same problem:
When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate ...
Easy to find. Easy to share.
October 31, 2008 at 1:06 a.m.
I come back to this thought again and again in my head:
I don't need more video, or more multimedia of any kind, or even databases or forums or yet another social network. All I want, as a reader, is news that is easy to find and easy to share. It's what I want in the sites I build and the newsrooms I work for, too.
Is this too much to ask?
Most days, I practically live in Google Reader. I have become so addicted to RSS, to the plain but well-structured layout of the feed, that anything ...
A word for managers
October 28, 2008 at 9:22 p.m.
From Joe Grimm, until recently of the Detroit Free Press, in his most recent (and always-excellent) Ask the Recruiter column:
We imperil our companies and our own careers when we do not listen closely to young people, whose experience with media is so different than our own and whose ideas may hold some of the solutions. Invite them into the strategy sessions, encourage them to really brainstorm and explain -- and then try some new ways.
Joe also has a blog.
There's no 'I' in team, but there sure is in China
August 30, 2008 at 2:13 a.m.
China won gold at more events than any other country in the Olympics, but it didn't take home the most gold medals, as Duke University political scientist Michael Allen Gillespie points out (via Tim Johnson). The reason: Americans dominated the team events, while Chinese athletes excelled in individual sports.
If one looks over all of the Olympic sports, Americans took home 118 gold medals, 99 silver medals and 76 bronze medals, while the Chinese took home 76 gold, 35 silver and 38 bronze medals. That is 293 total medals for the USA to 149 for China.The point here ...
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