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ABOUT: This entry was posted January 2, 2007 at 9:20 p.m. It is 845 words long, which, in case you're curious, translates to about 24 inches. There are currently 0 comments on this post. Click here to add your own.

SUMMARY: An announcement of the car-chase.net relaunch, with an update on what I've been up to and a preview of things to come.

TAGS: Django | Site | Career | Python


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And we're back ...

Posted Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 9:20 p.m.

First off, a thousand pardons. Between my new job, my ongoing job and my old, lingering job(s), I haven’t had the time I had planned to devote to this redesign. To the few of you who pestered me to finish, thanks for staying on my case.

Now, that said, here it is: car-chase.net relaunched in all its Django-riffic glory ... sort of. To be clear, it's not done. Expect a lot of bugs to pop up during the next few weeks and plan on new features being added shortly.

When I started this project in September, I wanted to accomplish two things: First, I wanted to advance my understanding of CSS. I’ve been doing a lot of Web development lately (see Vox), and I’ve fallen far behind on my design coding. Second, I wanted to build a custom backend that would last a while – and I wanted it all done from scratch. All in all, I’m happy with the results, even though I still have quite a ways to go.

I’m not a designer. I have no desire to be one, and I doubt I ever will. So for my inspiration, I owe a lot to geniuses like Jeff Croft, Wilson Miner, Khoi Vinh, Nathan Borror and others. I’m confident that if you took apart my design, each component would match something of theirs. They didn’t protest because I didn’t ask them. I was, and still am, counting on their mercy and generosity.

The development was all me. And by me, I mean Django. If you haven’t used it yet, you’re missing out. What few functions Django didn’t handle, I wrote in Python. Behind the scenes, most of my data exchange is done using JSON, which I also highly recommend.

Some features you may or may not notice: links will be updated almost daily. They’re parsed every 30 minutes from my del.icio.us account into the Django framework to facilitate archiving and comments. Actual posts have customary Digg/Newsvine/etc. links attached. The comments system is extremely robust, with automatic comment spam filtering and other useful features attached. Everything under the sun has a feed. For the sake of starting fresh, I decided not to carry over much content from my last site, but archives (when I have posts to archive) will be more intuitive. Everything is generally more efficient.

Am I happy with this relaunch? Almost. The design isn’t quite where I want it to be, and I wish I could have launched with more features. But at some point, it just became a matter of getting something up at all. Fortunately, I now have the freedom to build just about anything. And believe me, cool things are coming.

What took so long

So here’s the skinny: When last we saw our intrepid hero, he had just accepted a job as the CAR specialist at the Houston Chronicle. He was also working as a Web developer for the Missouri School of Journalism (again, see Vox), where he was building cool stuff using Python/Django while learning the painful arts of shell scripting and Apache configuration.

Not much has changed. I’m loving the Chronicle job, and Brian, Ryan and I launched our first online pub in November, with a second (and long overdue) launch set for early this year. On the side, I’m studying statistics – a potentially hopeless endeavor I’m pursuing out of necessity. I’m also gearing up to teach a college course in computer-assisted reporting next fall.

In the few months I’ve been at the Chronicle, I’ve had the fortune to be part of a few particularly interesting stories. Most recently, city call reporter Matt Stiles and I revealed that City Council members had accepted about $30,000 in potentially illegal campaign contributions during the last election cycle, thanks to a law prohibiting donations from contractors with business before Council. Because the city’s campaign records are kept largely on paper and in PDFs, creating and joining master contributions and contractors files – and then integrity-checking them – was a pretty heavy task. It was a perfect example of CAR enabling a story that otherwise would have been impossible. I’ve done a few other cool things as well, which I’ll write about shortly.

What's in store

I have big plans for this site. Or creative plans, at least. Among other things, I hope to use this site to aggregate most of my CAR-related online activities – relevant Google searches, wiki contributions, code contributions, etc. The idea is that all these things, taken together, will provide material for others to either learn from or expand on.

At the risk of making empty promises, I’ll keep the specifics under wraps. In the short term, I need to finish a few of the basic features I’ve managed to neglect – the search form and dynamic feeds, for example. And before anyone makes fun of it, I also need to clean up my code.

So stay tuned. Let me know what you think. Most of all, thanks for reading.

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