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Courant no longer…

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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New Business Models for News

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.


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Who will pay the messengers?

11.13.09 Posted in Personal by Max

Fol­low­ing are my notes from the “Jour­nal­ism and the New Media Ecol­ogy: Who will pay the mes­sen­gers?” con­fer­ence hosted by Yale Law School and the Yale Infor­ma­tion Soci­ety Project.

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Courant News: Caching

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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October Code Sprint Results

10.24.09 Posted in Courant News, Software Development, Yale Daily News by Max

Today Rob and I did a Courant News code sprint to get momen­tum build­ing again. I did some YDN work first and then worked on fin­ish­ing search func­tion­al­ity, while Rob focused on a new “head­ers” app that we’ve been brain­storm­ing for the past week.

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Keeping Courant with Annie Le Coverage

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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Seeking Web/UX Designer

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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Portland & Courant News: Short URLs

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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Courant News: Email Engine

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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Clean Install Software

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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