02.21.10 Posted in College News, Courant News, Yale Daily News by Max
On October 26, 2008, the first bits were committed to the private Courant News project repository. At the time, Rob, Paul and I were going to offer a hosted SaaS product for college news organizations, freeing them from the grasps of College Publisher and providing a stable foundation for the future. In February 2009, we decided not to pursue the project as a business, but agreed to continue development as an open-source project. On April 7, 2009, we opened our code to the public. After launching the Yale Daily News on Courant in September 2009, we finally started to pick up steam in the past month. But after deep reflection, we have decided to cease development of the project.
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12.08.09 Posted in Personal by Max
For my Introduction to Law & Technology class this semester, I worked with two of my classmates on a survey of new business models for journalism and news organizations. The results can be found on the website we have created, including a full recap and notes of the Knight Media conference held at the Yale Law School in November.
We performed survey research on eight of the most discussed new business models for news, although we tried not to prescribe any of them as “the” solution. As countless others have pointed out, there will not be any single solution that will work for any or all news organizations, so it is instead important to understand how each might contribute to a new news organization structure. We hope to update the site periodically as events unfold in the industry, and will continue to post to our Publish2 newsgroup as we come across relevant new content.
We hope our research and summaries are useful to interested observers, especially those who may not have been following the issues at hand as closely as we have. Feel free to give feedback and let us know what you think.
11.13.09 Posted in Personal by Max
11.07.09 Posted in Courant News by Max
The key to performance for high-traffic websites is caching. Facebook is famous for being a prolific memcached user, with 28 terabytes of memcached servers as of December 2008. Part of why the Yale Daily News was able to survive massive traffic spikes during the Annie Le coverage was our judicious use of caching. Read on to learn more about the caching strategies employed by the Courant News platform.
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09.23.09 Posted in Courant News, Yale Daily News by Max
On September 2nd, the Yale Daily News published its first issue of the fall 2009 semester. Although appearing to the casual observer to be just another issue, there was one huge difference: it was running on the new Courant News online publishing platform. Just one week later, Yale graduate student Annie Le went missing. The following ten days resulted in enormous national and international coverage of the case and a record surge in traffic to our website. Courant News played a huge role in our outstanding coverage and lack of downtime during the traffic spikes.
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09.10.09 Posted in College News, Courant News by Max
Last night I posted a cryptic job offering on Twitter, even offering to pay for the work. After getting a number of private queries for more information, I thought I’d make my request public instead of privately emailing half a dozen people.
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08.12.09 Posted in Courant News by Max
This past Saturday I joined Daniel Bachhuber and David Estes in Portland to talk journo dev projects. We talked about workflow engines, news wikis, virtual assignment desks, and other miscellaneous topics, but eventually Daniel and I got to work on building a simple short URL app for Django/Courant News.
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07.19.09 Posted in Courant News by Max
As I work on the last pieces needed to launch the YDN on Courant next month, I finally got around to implementing the email engine for Courant and the YDN site.
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07.14.09 Posted in Personal by Max
With all the talk of web versus desktop lately, I decided to reflect on what software I use outside of my web browser. A good way to think about this is to list all the software that you install on a fresh installation of your operating system (Windows, OSX, or Linux).
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