June 29, 2004, 11:35 AM ET
Job: Web developer for World Online in Lawrence, Kansas
Alas, my friend and co-worker Simon Willison will be completing his year-long job placement and leaving our company in a few months to go back to school in England. We at World Online are officially looking for a Web programmer/developer to fill his position -- as soon as possible. (UPDATE, August 2004: We've filled the position. We're no longer accepting applications. Thanks to all applicants for their interest.)
About the company
World Online is the Web division of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kan. It's one of the most innovative online-news operations in the world. Our main sites are LJWorld.com (news), Lawrence.com (entertainment) and KUsports.com (sports). All three have garnered an impressive batch of industry awards -- and tremendous industry attention -- over the past few years.
If you're in the online media field, or trying to get into it, this is the place to be for innovation.
From a Web-development perspective, we strive for innovation, nimble development and the use of best practices. We have a near-religious focus on doing things the right way -- clean URLs, CSS, separation of content from presentation, accessibility, solid application design, etc.
From a content perspective, we pride ourselves on being hyper-local, converged across multiple media (TV, newspaper, Web) and focused on overkill. This is the type of place that doesn't just cover little-league baseball games with a story or two in the Sunday paper; it devotes an entire print publication and Web site to it, with cell-phone updates, weblogs and intensive team/league/field databases.
This is the type of newspaper that, unlike 90 percent of American newspapers, places less of a value on profit and much more of a value on the role of news in community. It is privately owned by an incredibly kind family who will probably know your name and say hello to you in the halls. The person in charge of the Web operation is Rob Curley, a visionary who will constantly challenge you, energize you and surprise you. And probably make fun of you, sometimes.
Please see the testimonials page of the upcoming online-journalism conference we're holding for more about our operation. Also check out Digital Journalist's article about us and Poynter.org's recent write-up about our conference.
About the town
Lawrence is great. To get an fair idea of it, take every negative stereotype about Kansas and reverse it. It's a midwestern college town with a nationally-renowned music scene and a thriving downtown that has put a mall out of business. It's close to Kansas City, too. See our own Lawrence.com or visitlawrence.com (which we developed as a commercial project over the past few months) for more.
About the position
Our Web-news operation relies heavily on custom development; pretty much everything is built in-house. The small-but-nimble development team handles everything technical for our network of sites. We're the people our newsroom comes to for implementing special features and workflow optimizations, and we're the people the online boss (Rob) comes to for building the frameworks for new sites and subsites.
We're looking for an expert Web programmer to join that development team. This person will work closely with me, the senior developer, to develop Web applications for internal and external use.
You are an excellent fit for this position if:
- You have significant experience building Web publishing systems/tools and managing dynamic Web sites.
- You have significant experience designing, maintaining and programming Web interfaces to databases.
- You have experience maintaining Linux servers -- preferably those of a Red-Hat-ish flavor.
- You learn new technologies quickly.
- You strongly value Web standards and other best-practice Web-development methodologies.
- You're full of innovative ideas and eager to implement them as soon as possible.
Experience with news and/or information sites is ideal but inessential.
We're open-source advocates. Our development platform is Python (mod_python) and PostgreSQL, so we will give preference to applicants who are experienced in those technologies. But we believe a solid background in, and understanding of, Web application design is more important than skill in a particular language or platform. So don't hesitate to apply if your Python skills aren't sharp but you think you could pick it up quickly.
How to get in touch
If you're interested and have some serious Web-development chops, e-mail me and Simon directly. I'm at aholovaty [at] ljworld [dot] com. Simon is at swillison [at] ljworld [dot] com. If you're just thinking about it, post a comment here with questions.
See also: Simon's blog entry on the topic.
The only bad thing
In the interests of fairness and honesty, I should mention this: There is one bad thing about working for World Online. After working here, you won't want to leave.
June 20, 2004, 2:41 AM ET
Accessing your Gmail contact list with Python
Many people have been wanting to import their existing e-mail address books into Gmail; address-book import is a feature the Gmail folks say they're planning but haven't released yet. To fill that void, I've updated gmail.py, my Python Gmail interface (see previous entry), to add methods to retrieve from, add to, and delete from your Gmail address book. Now importing and exporting is possible.
It's still raw Python code at the moment; it just needs a snazzy user interface and bindings to popular e-mail address-book formats. Any Python coders out there want to collaborate? Leave a comment or contact me.
June 18, 2004, 5:51 PM ET
Accessing your Gmail inbox with Python
Introducing gmail.py, a Python script that can log into a Gmail inbox and export messages as raw e-mail source, suitable for backup and import into other e-mail programs. It doubles as a Python interface to Gmail, so you can interact with your inbox from the Python command line (on a limited, read-only basis).
The product of a few nights' coding as a mental exercise, it's in its very early stages, but it seems to work for me. I haven't decided yet whether I want to take this on as a project or leave it as is. As it stands, you need to know Python to use it. Please let me know whether you're interested in seeing this go further.
I suspect this script will become obsolete as soon as Gmail starts offering export features of its own, but it's useful for backup purposes for now.
See also:
- Pop Goes The Gmail, a somewhat similar app for Windows
- Gotmail, a similar app for Hotmail
- FetchYahoo, a similar app for Yahoo Mail
June 15, 2004, 8:02 PM ET
Required reading from Barry Parr
Lately, Barry Parr has been kicking butt, taking names and spelling them correctly. His "Why can't a newspaper be more like a blog" series should be required reading for news-site managers, and his harsh critique of yesterday's FoxNews.com redesign is hilarious -- and deserved. (See also: Lost Remote's coverage.) Keep it comin', Barry.
June 15, 2004, 7:40 PM ET
New Media Journalism.com: A promising new resource
Spied in the Holovaty.com comments section: New Media Journalism.com, an inspiring collection of ideas, experiments and short essays about online journalism. Judging by the lack of Google mentions, it appears to have been started just a short time ago.
Particularly interesting are Fishbone, an experiment in dynamically embedding additional information within a news story, and iTunes and WebFeed Aggregators, a proposal to integrate iTunes-ish features with RSS in a news context. But, really, pretty much everything on the site is stimulating. Don't miss the short, topical idea snippets.
This is great stuff! Can't wait to read more.
June 14, 2004, 2:32 PM ET
Seen the BugMeNot bookmarklet yet?
Lotsa people know about BugMeNot, the centralized database of usernames and passwords for Web sites that require free registration (such as, alas, many news sites). But have you seen the bookmarklet?
On the BugMeNot home page, click on the link that says "bookmarklet" and drag it to your bookmarks/favorites. From then on, whenever you're at a registration log-in page, just click that bookmark and it will pop-up a window with a username and password for the site that you're currently looking at.
Pretty awesome.
The next step will be browsers that automatically log you in to registration-based sites based on a centralized database of free accounts -- so you don't even *see* the log-in screen. I smell an arms race.
June 13, 2004, 11:02 PM ET
Unsuckifying All Music Guide links
In my eternal quest to explore and collect obscure 1960s pop/rock, no site has helped me more than All Music Guide -- a tremendous database that seems to be an attempt to catalog all recorded music. It just might be my favorite non-Google-nor-Amazon Web site.
The annoying thing about it, though, is it uses JavaScript almost exclusively for its internal links. AMG links don't point to a distinct URL; rather, each link executes custom JavaScript code -- such as <a href="javascript:z('Awgde4j370wat')"> -- that does the actual page redirection. Not only does that make the site useless for people with JavaScript turned off, but it's also an annoyance for folks like me who like to browse by middle-clicking links to open them in background tabs.
Here, then, is a bookmarklet that converts each JavaScript URL on any All Music Guide page into a normal URL, suitable for middle-clicking:
Unsuckify All Music Guide links
I've tested it in Mozilla Firefox 0.8.
June 11, 2004, 5:39 PM ET
'Game': Fun with databases
Over the past week or so, I've had the opportunity to help put together Game, which is both a daily Web site and weekly print publication devoted to summer little-league baseball and softball in Lawrence, Kan.
The Web site is pretty cool in that it's almost completely databased -- and shows the advantages of taking extra time to define and isolate relationships between data. For instance, in the system, a game is associated with two teams. Each team is associated with a coach and a league. A league has a set of rules, a player agreement and an association with cell-phone and/or e-mail rescheduling alerts. Games take place at playing fields, which optionally have associated 360° photo VR things.
Once I defined these core relationships and our two crack Web interns started entering leagues, teams and games into the system, automating the site was a piece of cake. For the list of playing fields, I told the system, "Show me all the playing fields, ordered alphabetically, and pull out the next few games for each one." Same for the list of leagues. A league detail page displays all the teams in that league and the league's full schedule. A team detail page displays the team's full schedule (but not its roster, for child-privacy reasons). A field detail page displays that field's schedule and information about the field. A game detail page displays information about that game -- the league, the teams, the place, the result, the date/time. All of this stuff is automated based on the core pieces of information entered by our Web producers and key local-sports-guru-Web-editor Levi Chronister.
My favorite part of the site is this: Because little-league games are so dependent on weather conditions, and because we conveniently have weathermen on staff who populate a database of forecasts for our weather site, Simon had the brilliant idea of cross-linking game detail pages with weather forecasts. So, if a game hasn't happened yet, the system checks our weather database for a forecast for that day and displays it. The beautiful thing about that is it's absolutely "free," because we were already compiling and storing that information, anyway. All it took was about 15 minutes of extra programming.
June 2, 2004, 1:38 AM ET
Purple numbers: Useful but unrealistic
Gaining attention lately is the idea of purple numbers -- a way for Web-page authors to make each individual paragraph on every page throughout their sites directly linkable. The idea is that each paragraph has a distinct URL and, thus, can be cited directly.
Influential technologist Tim Bray first tossed around the idea last week; then Simon Willison followed up with a somewhat elegant solution to the problem of how to display the paragraph-level hooks to which people should link; Mark Pilgrim took the idea to its logical extreme; and Chris Dent compiled a bunch of links to various people's comments. Already a few weblogs have implemented the paragraph-level linking scheme, using purple-pound-sign links as hooks after each graf.
I don't plan to implement purple numbers on this site yet, if ever, mainly because I'd rather not litter my pages with distracting post-paragraph links (initially visible or not), but I point it out because it's an interesting idea news-site maintainers should know about. Would there be value in being able to link directly to a particular paragraph in a Washington Post story -- say, a telling quote or a provocative fact? Probably. Would it be worth it if, in the process, it confused millions of people who didn't know why they'd started to see purple pound signs all over the place? Probably not.
