Well, loyal TKS Dev Team fans–I bet you’re dying to know what we’ve been up to this term, huh?
Wait, I’m an editor?
We started off with a pretty major power shift. Matt, our founding developer, graduated last spring and I, Ellie, have taken over his job as lead developer and online editor. It’s been quite the adjustment, but I’ve settled in. I’m also surprised that I’m able to offer some journalistic/editorial contributions to the rest of the staff during our meetings. Unlike Matt, I have no journalism training or experience. When Matt was in charge, he was basically doing two jobs–leading the team and acting as an editor.
Now I consider myself more like a supporting editor. My primary jobs are leading the dev team and acting as a liaison between the developers and the editors/writers/photographers. I also handle a lot of the little technical details here and there so that the editors and the developers don’t have to worry about them. (Stuff like adding HTML formatting to articles, making sure everything has been uploaded and published, making sure the school actually pays our web hosting bill, and of course, hacking together quick fixes when an editor stumbles across a bug.)
It’s been a busy term for everyone on the team, so development has been a bit slower that we’d like.
Fall term projects
Cleaning up/maintenance (Peter) - Peter has been busy this term, but he’s working on some general cleanup and maintenance on our webfaction server. He’s also been trying to merge our tks_redesign branch into trunk, has been facing undocumented and unexpected trouble, and in his frustration has considered giving up on svn and using git instead.
Learning! (Richard) – Richard is a senior and a new member of our team. He’s been working on learning about Django, Python, and web development. (And of course the requisite struggles with setting up a dev environment.) He’s working on a simple intro project:
Template tags for link formatting (Richard) – After noticing lots of unhyperlinked web addresses in stories that I had to convert to HTML hyperlinks, I decided that we should write some simple template tags to automatically convert web addresses to links. (Lots of webapps, email programs, etc. already do this.) So anything following the format “http://” or “www” will be converted to a hyperlink. Email addresses will be converted to a mailto link (or, ideally, something more spamproof.) Simple, but a good beginner’s project.
Email digest feature (Ellie) – This is something I’ve been wanting to work on for a long time. I’m writing an app that hooks into our main “newsroom” application to provide functionality for email-based TKS subscriptions. It maintains a database of subscribed email addresses (unsubscribing is also an option, of course.) Once a week, when an editor (me) clicks a button, the application generates a digest email of the last seven days of articles and delivers it to the inbox of all of the subscribers. It also archives a copy of the email that was sent… just to be safe. Maybe someday we would want the weekly delivery to be automated, but for now I’d rather that a human being be the one to decide when to email possibly even 1000+ email addresses. Our publishing cycle isn’t regular enough and we would have to be able to turn it off over breaks and such.
Right now the bulk of this work is done. (It has been my major project this term, and a lot more effort than I expected.) I’m debugging and working on making the actual email template itself look nice. The goal is to publicly release this feature at the beginning of winter term (but there will probably be a private release late this term to test it out among the staff and such.) Before we deploy it, I also want to add some middleware or something so that we are counting the number of hits we’re getting to the site from these subscription emails. Why?
People are already complaining about the paper copies of TKS that are distributed to everyone on campus each week. Offering a digital subscription option will only make people more frustrated with the paper paper. Someday, TKS will only be online. When that happens, the editors will magically have 10 extra hours each week that they would have spent laying out the paper that they could spend writing stories and publishing them online as they happen. (They will also lose the “valuable journalism experience” of laying out the paper.) I want to have as much data as I can about how people are using the TKS website so that the TKS staff, the college, our advertisers, and the developers can be more informed as the transition looms far off in the distance.
Plans for next term
Usability testing! (Because we need it, and because Ellie has become quite the usability nerd in the course of her Honors project.) Peter is taking CS 262 and is intrigued by the idea. I’ve been noticing a lot of little problems with both the public interface and the admin interface. I want to address those and conduct some usability testing to find more. Some examples include:
- Using thumbnails to browse photos in admin interface
- Using live search to search for authors in admin interface
- Possibly testing the use of a simple markup language and accompanying editor so that staff can apply text formatting. (I’m a big Markdown fan, and there’s a great JS-based editor for it. Check out WMD.
- Fixing the most glaring usability problem in our public interface: how an unlogged in user sees the article comment section. (Oh, it’s bad.)
Recruiting fresh blood! We’re planning to bring a younger team member on board. We have a few ideas lined up (we’re waiting for them to finish CS 262…)
I think that’s it… thanks for reading! Suggestions and ideas are already welcome.
Signing off, Editor Ellie (epoley at knox dot edu)
