projects

Stuff to learn in 2009

Viaggiatore — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:20:00 -0600

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 [...]
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New tools for new news

Viaggiatore — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:28:00 -0600

Journalists need new tools to work online. In the last year, I’ve used more that I can count, most of them free, to find and tell better stories on the Web.
Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I [...]
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Local is what local covers

Viaggiatore — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:44:00 -0600

Following up on my last post, I started listing in my head all the places and non-places my local newspaper, like every paper I’ve read or worked for, covers. Here’s a partial list for a few news organizations:
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA):
Places:

Santa Rosa
Rohnert Park
Petaluma (bureau)
Sebastopol
Winsdor
Healdsburg
Graton
Guerneville
Ukiah (bureau)
Lake County
Mendocino County
Occasional ventures into Napa, Marin and San [...]
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Finding a local news feed

Viaggiatore — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:20:00 -0600

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 [...]
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DalianDalian is down

Viaggiatore — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:03:00 -0600

Apologies to anyone looking for bars, restaurants or news about Dalian. The site is down with a bad case of DOS.
We (by which I mostly mean Alex) are looking into the matter, which may or may not involve new hosting.
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Geotagging: News here, now (or there, then)

Viaggiatore — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:57:00 -0500

In a comment on yesterday’s post about making news easy to find and easy to share, Alex reminds me that he and I have had this conversation before. Now that I think about it, we’ve had this conversation a lot, especially about finding relevant news based on location.
And about this time last year you and [...]
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Easy to find. Easy to share.

Viaggiatore — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:06:00 -0500

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 [...]
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