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.
Keeping Courant with Annie Le Coverage
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.
Seeking Web/UX Designer
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.
Portland & Courant News: Short URLs
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.
Courant News: Email Engine
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.
Clean Install Software
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).
Courant News: Model Customization
For those who read through the Courant News documentation, you might have noticed that to customize articles we created a model inheritance system. However, upon further reflection, we feel that this is not the right approach for many reasons, and have devised a new system.
Space Shuttle Launch
The past few days, my father and I went down to Orlando to see the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch into space on mission STS-125, the final repair mission to the Hubble space telescope. We managed to snag tickets to watch the launch from the closet point open to the public, the NASA Causeway about 5 miles from the Pad 39A complex. Following are my pictures from the launch and from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, as well as my reaction to the launch itself.
On Forward Thinking in College News
As with the news industry at large, I get the sense that there are really two camps in the world of college news: the one that has existed for decades, and a newly emerging one which is pushing the definition of college journalism in the online realm. This post was inspired by a session I attended last weekend at BCNI Philly and a recent post by College Publisher in response to the activities of CoPress and others helping move college news orgs to open source solutions like WordPress.
Courant News: How to Contribute
Courant News was finally open sourced this past weekend while I was attending BCNI Philly. That included the code, documentation, and the opening of the project wiki and mailing list. While we’ve had a healthy number of people look at the site according to our analytics and logs, we’ve not really had any contributions from outside the original team yet. Granted, it’s only been four days, but I thought I’d help streamline the process of finding a way to contribute.