10/26/2009
What data exploration feels like.
07/06/2009
A set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.
Video, with lots of insight into the EveryBlock effort. Data structure, templating, how data is gathered, etc.
06/27/2009
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text -- a newspaper story -- that has no chance of being repurposed.
From the UK's Guardian. Topics include:
Buried deep within the bowels of the existing template tags and filters, Django has a few gems you may not know about
12/03/2008
We’re going to build a map of some of my favourite restaurants in Brighton. Fitting with the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript, we’ll start with a semantically marked up list of restaurants, then use JavaScript to add the map, look up the restaurant locations and plot them as markers.
11/22/2008
News mapping resources
11/20/2008
In addition to explaining how they integrate these disparate sources of data together, Holovaty also shares several tips for gathering open data sources. Hint; treat the providers of the data as partners and give them the respect and credit they are due. He also explains what are the best types ...
Replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software and produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to our design goals
11/08/2008
One of the most frequent questions I get is, "What software do you use to visualize data?" A lot of people are excited to play with their data, but don't know how to go about doing it or even start. Here are the tools I use or have used ...
Great write up on how to scrape Web page for data and save the results to your own database.
Whenever I caucus with aspiring NICARians and other data hungry reporters, it’s not long before the topic of web scraping comes up. While automated text processing and database management may ...
You will notice that headlines use the font class headlines. It just so happens that an unintentional advantage to Cascading Style Sheets is that it makes our data extraction lives much easier. You will find this pattern in many, if not all, websites on the internet, where data is differentiated ...
Screen scraping is the art of programatically extracting data from websites. If you think it's useful: it is. If you think it's difficult: it isn't. And if you think it's easy to really piss off administrators with ill-considered scripts, you're damn right. This is a ...
Most popular web services have programmable interfaces. These interfaces allow developers to extract information out of the system. This creates a whole new genre of storytelling: storytelling with public databases. You can aggregate the information you need and sort it the way you want.
10/26/2008
Django and Flash make pretty on the Las Vegas Sun weather pages.
Creating a simple public API for your site is a lot easier than you may think with Django.
With the release of Django 1.0, we’re pleased to announce the release of a completely updated version of our highly popular Django Cheat Sheet which is crammed with a whole host of useful Django information.
From Mercurytide. Sweet.
Teaching Online Journalism's Mindy McAdams does a nice write up on what sets the Las Vegas Sun apart from other news sites.
While they’re shooting tons of video and chasing breaking news, the journalists at the Las Vegas Sun also manage to produce some darned impressive large projects ...
A series of advanced screencast lessons from Django guru Eric Florenzano. Lessons one and two include "setting up version control, building the models, views, and crafting the templates, to setting up and automatically deploying to a production server."
Don't miss the rest of the series - 12 screencasts so far!
A configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response.
There are quite a few great little tricks and tips one could use on their Django projects that would speed up development and save many headaches in the long run. From basic to obscure, these tips can help any skill-level of programmer become more adept with Django and all it ...
A great list with tips for beginners and experts.
The point is to provide information that the audience is really happy to get in a frequently updated fashion — and to do so in a way that is easy for people to use and pleasant enough for them to consume (like this). But having real humans sit down and write ...
A growing collection of all things Django.
Django’s templating system is one of its strongest points, in my opinion, and one of it’s coolest features it the “fallback” system used for locating templates. When used wisely, it can allow for a situation in which you can literally design an entire site by creating only one ...
10/24/2008
Online Journalism Review Q&A with Adrian Holovaty.
OJR: I think one can safely assume that everyone in the news business understands how one "does journalism" through writing or photography. But how does one "do journalism" through computer programming?
Holovaty: The way I see it, there are three basic tasks ...
In an effort to help future WebFaction Djangonauts, here are some most-read posts from WebFaction's excellent user-forum and knowledgebase.