Today’s brief post will cover Courant’s maintenance mode. This mode allows authorized staff to view and perform work on the site while the rest of the world sees a simple message informing them that the site is currently unavailable. There are a number of uses for such a feature, which I will describe briefly.
One of the big problems with a certain popular online publishing platform for college news is that the service takes a major cut of the site’s ad revenue in return for covering the hosting and infrastructure costs. Therefore, a major appeal of moving off said platform and running your own site is that you get full control of your advertising. Today’s post is about how we handle ads in Courant News.
As I’ve discussed before, one of the core design tenets of Courant News was the ability for news orgs to customize and add on to our core platform without having to modify the code of the platform itself. While it is possible to create a cohesive platform, it is more difficult to allow outside code to hook into it without actually modifying the platform itself.
One common way, adopted by the Django built-in admin app, as well as a number of common Django reusable apps like django-tagging and django-mptt, is that of a registry system. I’ve been joking with one of my Courant cohorts, Robert Baskin (@rsbaskin), on twitter about registries, and I thought it was time to let everyone else in on the discussion.
Something that I’ve struggled mightily with is the trouble of recruiting technical talent for college news organizations. It appears to be a common problem, and yet I have heard few good solutions.
Everyone seems to want to create the next popular CMS. Whether it’s for blogging, brochureware, e-commerce, or news, there’s no shortage of people looking to build the next big thing. I admit to being one of those people. But as I’ve been doing market research and competitive analysis for the better part of 9 months now, one thing has struck me in particular: most of these people do not truly understand why software like WordPress and Drupal have succeeded, and thus go down roads towards mediocrity and obscurity.
Today’s topic of discussion is static pages in Courant News. Virtually all sites have static pages of some sort, such as an About page. Following is a brief overview of how we have handled such a common feature.
In keeping with my attempt to do one blog post each day, today I’m going to talk about media in Courant News. One of the largest advantages of the web over print is the ability to publish virtually unlimited amounts of multimedia. Whereas articles often have at most one photograph associated with them in the print edition, we have the ability to publish all kinds of multimedia with our articles online: photos, videos, audio clips, interactive graphics, files, etc, etc. First I’ll look at the reasons for doing this, and then specifically how Courant News handles media.
Today Joey Baker tweeted about a link to a blog post on the Nieman Journalism Lab which talks about the author’s vision of the future of digital news creation and utilization. One of the core concepts was the idea that a wiki would serve as an authoritative information source, to which blog or news posts would point for background while providing just new tidbits of information themselves. This reminded me of Daniel Bachhuber’s post on topical wikis on the CoPress blog a few months ago. Daniel and I had had a personal conversation about the topic, but I’m not sure I really understood it at the time.
This week’s topic of discussion at the CoPress forums regards email subscriptions/alerts, something which I’ve given a fair amount of thought to in the past few months. Today’s post will cover how the YDN has used email subscriptions up to the present and some ideas for email handling in Courant News.