February 11, 2005, 12:45 AM ET
Job opportunity: Web developer at Florida news site
This is a paid advertisement.
TCPalm.com, the Web site of three daily newspapers on Florida's Treasure Coast, seeks someone with strong experience building dynamic Web applications to develop and maintain rich databases of online content with outstanding usability.
Duties include:
- Building and supporting data-driven Web site features and applications
- Improving and maintaining content publishing tools
- Communicating and coordinating with developers and system administrators at our corporate hosting facility
- Meeting and anticipating needs of the content team
- Making changes to our site to enhance usability
- Taking initiative to suggest projects
This position requires:
- Superb Web application programming skills. We have existing code in ColdFusion, ASP, PHP and TCL, but knowledge of those specific languages is nowhere near as important as knowing a language(s) expertly enough to write clean and well-documented code and create great data models and algorithms.
- Intimate knowledge of HTML/XHTML and CSS
- Experience with JavaScript and the DOM
- Above all, a strong talent for problem-solving
You'll fit in well here if you know how people use news and information Web sites, have a passion for making great stuff plus a keen attention to detail, and keep the end user constantly in mind. Journalism experience or an understanding of the news industry would certainly be helpful but is not required.
To apply, e-mail a resume, URLs of your work, and a sample of your best source code to online editor Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman at nathan@tcpalm.com.
February 8, 2005, 9:58 PM ET
Lawrence.com relaunched
In the now-that-the-dust-has-cleared department, I should probably announce that Lawrence.com, one of the sites I work for, relaunched a month or so ago -- with a brand-new, design courtesy of Dan Cox and the sleek publishing system we've been working on for the past year. That is some complex all-CSS design work, and Dan deserves a heckuva lot of credit for it.
We added tons of new features, including custom user playlists, RSS feeds like crazy, user comments all over the place, a mobile edition and a bunch additions to the most heavily-fielded restaurant database ever publicly released (?).
Plus, we've got a smarter search engine and custom search alerts that let you get notified by e-mail, cell phone and/or RSS whenever we add content that matches your search terms (as reported on CyberJournalist.net).
The whole thing is turning into a combination of an events calendar, citizen journalism, Friendster and All Music Guide -- all in a local entertainment context. I love it!
February 8, 2005, 12:03 PM ET
A few ideas for Google Maps
Being a map buff, I can't get over how cool Google Maps is. It crushes the competition.
That said, I have a few ideas for improving it:
- When driving directions expand past the bottom of the page, requiring the user to scroll down, it's tedious to click on one of the directions and have to scroll up to see the turn-specific map for that direction. Perhaps the directions could be in a
<div>withoverflow: autoset, so no scrolling would be necessary. - From the main page, I zoomed in all the way, just for fun -- but I had no idea where that took me. (Nebraska? Kansas?) It'd be helpful if the site displayed the name of the city and state in the case when the entire map's contents are certain to be within a single city.
- Incorporate public transportation. Add an "I'm taking public transit" option, which would change the driving-directions algorithm to look at public-transit routes.
- Incorporate current traffic. Scrape (or partner with) traffic sites so that the system weighs current traffic patterns -- influencing the driving directions and displaying an "estimated time" for each leg of the journey.
- Incorporate Google Suggest, so that addresses are auto-completed.
- When will a driving-directions program advise me to use Lower Wacker Drive? That really is the Turing Test for map programs that give directions in Chicago.
