Features
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 21
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers meetups around Europe and the U.S. this week, plus, hacking European Parliament data this weekend.
Project How We Made the Random Oscar Winner Generator
Time’s interactive graphic editor explains how he built a not-so-random film blurb madlibs generator in the run-up to the Academy Awards.
Project Data Journalism Community, Why and How Do We Do This Work?
David Eads wants to start a conversation about the power of data-driven journalism to engage and teach new developers, and he needs your feedback.
Tool Animation With Filmstrips
The code and thinking behind NPR’s implementation of the JPEG “filmstrip” technique in “Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt.”
Project To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet
At the Chicago Tribune, we had a simple goal: to automatically tweet contributions to Illinois politicians of $1,000 or more, which campaigns are required to report within five business days. To see, in something approximating real time, which campaigns are bringing in the big bucks and who those big-buck-bearers are. The Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) has helpfully published exactly this data for years online, in a format that appears to have changed very little since at least the mid-2000s. There’s no API for this data, but the stability of the format is encouraging. A scraper is hardly an ideal tool for anything intended to last for a while and produce public-facing data, but if we can count on the format of the page not to change much over at least the next several months, it’s probably worth it.
Project The Code (and Thinking) Behind Today’s Paper
- By Alastair Coote, Kathryn Faulkner, Erin Kissane, Andrew Phelps
- Alastair Coote, Kathryn Faulkner, Andrew Phelps
- The New York Times
Last month, while the team behind today’s NYT redesign were crunching away on final adjustments, another team at the Times launched Today’s Paper, an infinite-scrolling, offline-caching web app available to the paper’s subscribers. We spoke with three members of the team—a developer, a designer, and an editor—about the project’s challenges and ambitions.
Project Behind the Scenes on the NYT Redesign
- By Erin Kissane, Eitan Konigsburg, Renda Morton, Allen Tan
- Eitan Konigsburg, Renda Morton, Allen Tan
- The New York Times
The New York Times just launched the first piece of their sitewide redesign: new article pages, with other tweaks and nudges throughout the site. We spoke with two designers and a developer who worked on the project to learn about the tech choices, design ideas, and strategy behind the new look and feel.
Project Introducing Treasury.IO
- By Michael Keller, Cezary Podkul
- Brian Abelson, Jake Bialer, Burton DeWilde, Michael Keller, Thomas Levine, Ashley Williams
The U.S. Treasury’s Daily Treasury Statement lists actual cash spending down to the million on everything the government spent money on each day, as well as how it funded the spending. But, the Treasury only releases these files in PDF or fixed-width text files like this one, making any analysis very difficult.
To liberate the data and make it easy to analyze federal money flows across time, we created Treasury.IO. The system we built downloads and parses the fixed-width files into a standard schema, creating a SQLite database that can be directly queried via a URL endpoint.
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 6
- By Erika Owens
It’s a new year and plenty of events are on the horizon: PDF Liberation Hackathon next weekend and many a Hacks/Hackers and ONA meetup.
Roundup 2013 Wrap-Up, Part 2
- By Erin Kissane
Just before Christmas, we asked you to submit one thing you found helpful or wonderful or excellent this year. Here’s part two of your favorite things—the first half lives here.
Roundup 2013 Wrap-Up, Part 1
- By Erin Kissane
Just before Christmas, we asked you to submit one thing you found helpful or wonderful or excellent this year. The gist where we made the call grew into its own comment ecosystem of awesome links, and we’ve combined those submissions with the ones you emailed and DMed.
Project Building “The Lobotomy Files”
- By Chris Canipe
- Chris Canipe, Jarrard Cole, Madeline Farbman, Dov Friedman, Robert Libetti, Adele Morgan, Joe Shoulak, Araby Williams
- The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Canipe explains how his team built their second-ever immersive project.
Project About that Guardian Website
Late last week, a good-sized chunk of the newsroom developers I follow on Twitter linked to the Guardian’s open sourced front-end code for their website, documented in full on GitHub. We spoke with with developer manager Matt Chadburn about the project.
Project How We Made the Book Concierge
The team behind the Book Concierge talks about their design work, implementation details, and team dynamics.
Roundup Event Roundup, Dec 10
- By Erika Owens
Start planning your 2014 hack days now. Coming up in January is the PDF Liberation Hackathon.
Project How We Made “Behind the Bloodshed”
- By Anthony DeBarros, Destin Frasier, Erin Kissane, Juan Thomassie
- Anthony DeBarros, Destin Frasier, Jerry Mosemak, Juan Thomassie
- Gannett Digital, USA Today
“Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings,” is a collaboration between the database team at USA Today and Gannett Digital’s interactive applications and design teams. We chatted with Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital, with input from colleagues Juan Thomassie and Destin Frasier, on how the project came together.
Project Collaborating on the T-Shirt Project
- By Brian Boyer, Erin Kissane
- Jeremy Bowers, Brian Boyer, Danny DeBelius, Alyson Hurt, Wes Lindamood
- NPR
Back in April of this year, NPR’s Planet Money began a Kickstarter campaign to learn about and report on global supply chains by making a t-shirt and telling the story of its creation from start to finish. The new Visuals team at NPR collaborated on the project’s web manifestation, which went live last night, but the source code is already on GitHub, and we spoke with team lead Brian Boyer about the collaboration.
Roundup Event Roundup, Dec 2
- By Erika Owens
Knight-Mozilla Fellows Sonya Song and Marcos Vanetta will present at events this week and civic hackathons around the world this weekend.
Project How We Made “NSA Files: Decoded”
- By Feilding Cage, Gabriel Dance
- Greg Chen, Gabriel Dance, Kenan Davis, Ewan MacAskill, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell, Bob Sacha, Ruth Spencer, Lisa van Gelder
- The Guardian
The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance and Feilding Cage break down their process, from storyboards and video production to major design changes and development challenges.
Roundup Event Roundup, Nov 25
- By Erika Owens
This week, Zurich launches a Hacks/Hackers chapter and Knight-Mozilla Fellow Annabel Church speaks at Hacks/Hackers London.
