Dive into the archives.
- Separating Data and Implementation for California’s War Dead project
A few months ago, I got a spreadsheet in my email which I quickly turned into a CSV file. The data was pretty straightforward, an id, first name, last name, date and another type of id. I was able to parse thru it, looking up the secondary id and date and coming back [...]
- Why Yelp Works
But Mr. Stoppelman said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third,” he said.
Pretty much sums it up… I think The Guide could take some cues from that.
More on Yelp and it still holds true even from 2006.
Hmm, what if [...]
- May Day March
Yesterday, lots of people walked by the office.
- Lowering Transaction Costs
I finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It’s one of those books which causes your brain to constantly look for patterns in everything you do. If you haven’t picked it up yet, you really should. It’s really good.
One of the main points I took away from it was how the [...]
- Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
It seems that yesterday and today were filled with various bits of Twitter. First, I added the Top of the Ticket blog to our various Twitter accounts at latimestot. I’m thinking about releasing the code for how I do it if I get approval. It’s pretty basic but could be useful for [...]
- The Pothole Paradox
Last year, Steven Johnson wrote about the Pothole Paradox and why it matters for local news. In a nutshell, it goes like this:
1. Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to [...]
- Dave Stevens, creator of ‘Rocketeer’ comic Passes Away
Dave Stevens, the artist who created the ‘Rocketeer’ comic passed away yesterday. The Times has a standard obituary but it’s a bummer we aren’t showing any of his work especially on the Web. Look at BoingBoing’s for comparison. There’s a great cover scan which is the least we could have done.
With his [...]
- No Architects Need Apply
So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood. Everybody pays their own freight. The more senior you are, the more you get to help and coach and mentor others. Leading means enabling others to do their job and make good decisions on their [...]
- Still grasping for a clue?
Lots of talk about Don MacAskill’s post detailing his experiences with BusinessWeek and the LA Times. Reading the bits about the Times makes me cringe. I want the experience to be different and I think there is a gathering momentum to do things in a much more Web-friendly way but we aren’t there [...]
- Changes at the Times
Over the weekend, there was a parting of the ways between The Times and former editor James O’Shea.
In a defiant speech delivered in the newsroom, O’Shea, 64, complained about what he called the “pervasive culture of defeat” manifested by repeated cutbacks in newsroom spending across the country. He attacked Tribune’s budgeting process for [...]
