Sporadically posts from someone who still does occasional 'blogging'
Last week I was on Holiday.
I thought of all the things I could do and learn on my week off. All the projects I’d been putting off, the blog posts I could write, the photos I’d been planning.
I napped, read, played and went for walks instead.
Last week was a good week.
Ah the excitement, some holiday on Monday and Tuesday that I actually spent not working, which was nice. So on the plus side, no email/meeting admin on Monday, yay! Downside, had to go thru it on Wednesday instead :(
Anyway, there was more Newspaper Club/The Long Good Read (TLGR) stuff last week. Wednesday was the first time in a few weeks that I’d been in the office, and was therefor the first chance I’d had to actually hand out the physical versions of The Long Good Read newspaper. As mentioned before physical objects seem to have more gravitas than digital ones, which I think means that the combination of both it and me being in the office allowed for a bunch of interesting conversations to take place.
One of those was a chat about possible paper futures for TLGR and how that’d work with the current Terms and Conditions on the API. Can’t say much more about that at the moment but fingers crossed that something may come of it “soon”.
The other was filling in a form proposing TLGR as a possible mobile app thingy. There’s a process at work, new-ish I think… or at least new-to-me, where you get to put forward proposals for projects that you think would be good/interesting/profitable. On the grounds that I think TLGR fulfills at least the first two of those criteria, I’ve submitted it for mobile review meeting thing, giving all the reasons I’ve previously bounced around on this blog.
It’s a long shot, we don’t have huge resources to do experimental things, but on the slim chance it gets accepted then it means I can put some of those proper resources to the project rather than just me hacking away at it. Otherwise I’ll just carry on with that hacking away bit anyway. Then when it’s a bit more developed propose it again, until either it gets accepted, I finish it anyway, or we’re all dead, whichever comes first.
What else? Hummmm…
Tumblr stuff: Had a couple of what-next meetings for Tumblr (or at least my bit of tumblr) and how we can continue to use it. I’ve previously mentioned what we did for Tumblr for SXSW, these were looking at possible new layouts that’d fit in with the site’s design, or used as components on the page. I already have the code that grabs the content from Tumblr and parses the video, images and so on, meaning it’s more of presentation issue than anything. My next action for that is mock up some designs and see what comes from that.
Zeitgeist stuff: Oh, had a meeting about this too which I can’t talk about yet. So, many, meetings! In the time between meetings I managed to tweak this a bit, but not as much as I wanted to. I’ll write more about this in a separate post sometimes when it’s a little further along. Some interesting stuff from an internal-tools point of view anyway.
Ooooh, so that was it (nearly). Just three separate projects, The Long Good Read, Tumblr and the Zeitgeist. It’s almost as though things have gotten sensible and manageable. It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts :)
One more thing: Had an exciting meeting at the Science Museum on Wednesday afternoon (see I said my time was full of meetings!). All very hand-wavy at the moment so obviously I can’t say anything about it. But come-on, Science Museum!! How can that be anything other than exciting.
Then I popped into the Natural History Museum to look at the Dinosaur bones before heading back to work :) Gotta make the most of visiting London!
Number of days Holiday: 2
Am I on Holiday this week: yes
Will that make for a short Weeknotes next week: probably ;)
Well, ok a little bit to do with newspapers, but that’s been covered already. Lets go for a day by day breakdown(ish)
Monday: Was spent doing emails and so on, and then making sure the latest paper edition of The Long Good Read was ready to be sent to Newspaper Club. More on that later. What was left of the day was spent looking at my “Secret” articles that have been drudged blog…
http://themetabrain.com/drudge/
I think I’ve mentioned it before but it’s a blog that has the latest articles that have appeared on The Drudge Report website. Behind the scenes a Google AppEngine thingy pokes Drudge once every few minutes to check for links to the Guardian, if it spots one it records it in the Database and posts the content to that WordPress Blog.
Sadly and I’m not sure why they don’t always get posted. I think there’s a timeout when posting to WordPress that I don’t bother to catch, mainly because it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. It’s also not so vitally important that it absolutely works. Or so I thought anyway.
Turns out some people here at the Guardian do use those pages to check up on what’s been happening recently-ish. So rather than relying on WordPress, I spent the rest of the day and Tuesday…
Tuesday: …creating a quick dashboard page that showed all the recently Drudged, Huff-Po-ed and things mentioned on Twitter in one easy to glance view. Which is another way of saying “I’ll get round to fixing that WordPress problem later”.
Wednesday: I also have Google AppEngine email out a notification when it spots something that’s been Drudged and for some odd reason it’s stopped sending the emails out. No change to the code, just all of a sudden things are getting drudged its going into the database, everything is just fine apart from the email part. Anyway, I put some logging code in and haven’t had a chance to touch it since, because…
Thursday: The “Most Viewed Component”, is a widget that sits on various article pages throughout the Guardian Site and shows “Most Viewed”, “Zeitgeist” and Latest. It gets this data from the Zeitgeist backend. But now it’s getting its data from the new Zeitgeist backend. Which is much like the old one, only better, faster and more awesomer.
It’s also slightly different so I had to spend some faffing around getting things to work. The AppEngine bit that creates the HTML for the widget it called the “View” app, it takes a JSON feed from the Zeitgeist and turns it into the HTML (and various caching and whatnot). The new Zeitgeist had to feed the JSON out in the same format. No a huge deal, just the normal faffing :)
Friday: I ran out of time on Thursday to roll out the changes to the site… or rather decided that 5:45pm wasn’t such a good time to make a big (to me) change. Friday was the day that I pointed the “View” app at the new JSON end-points. Everything went pretty smoothly, I had some miss-matches between sections in the old system and new system “tvandradio” vs “tv-and-radio” and “globaldevelopment” vs “global-development”, which took a small tweak to fix.
After all sorts of playing with other stuff for Secret-Project, SXSW tumblers, newspapers and so on, it’s rather nice to be back on rolling out the new Zeitgeist over the site and getting rid of the old one. There’s still a lot of work to do on that, unpicking various pieces over the next few weeks. But once it’s all done it’ll be a great platform for building new stuff.
Considering there’s been so much I’ve been wanting to do with it for ages already, getting these things moved over can’t happen soon enough. I suspect however as much as I’d like it to happen quickly, with my holiday days (I’m on holiday a couple of days this week, and all next week) and some other stuff still going on, that dream is still a way off.
A couple of weeks ago I posted Long-Form Reading, Newspaper Club and the Guardian API my first attempt at doing a newspaper version of The Long Good Read website. In it I listed a few things I’d gotten wrong with the design and decisions, this is an iteration over that with a few changes.
As an aside observation, it seems to take about 6-7 iterations for “amateurs” to plateau on a pretty decent profession looking result. I’ve seen this happen quickly with zines, the first issue is often hastily put together, photocopied and stapled up (this is going back a fair few years mind). The person doing it very quickly notices the mistakes of the first one, and corrects them by the second iteration. They miss a few things, which they fix in the 3rd and 4th at which point they start taking cues from existing “successful” products.
At around the 6th iteration things get into a groove, and by the 7th either a format is set or playfulness with the format emerges.
Or maybe most people give up before then so we don’t often see the ones that didn’t make it.
You can kind of see it with the BoingBoing zine below, Issues 2, 6 and 11. Issue 2 is pretty much as you’d expect, by #6 most of the design elements are in, #11 has full on barcode and glossy cover, later issues start to play around with the cover design.
Of course it’s not just about print media, you can hear the same thing happen with the Shift Run Stop Podcast, if you listen to the first 5 you can hear Leila and Roo pretty quickly get into their stride as the sound quality, format and structure for the rest of the series fall into place.
The more you start new things over and over again, the faster you can get up to speed. In the UK we all got to watch this play out in-front of us (if we wanted) with Channel 4s 10 O’Clock Live. The first episode, although well rehearsed had it’s weak points, the second was much tighter, the 3rd was basically the template by which the rest of the series has run. A couple of episodes ago we got to the “play” stage with a scene involving Jimmy Carr acknowledging that he dresses up each week and toying with that construct.
Anyway the point being that pick anything; making a film, a TV program, a screencast, a magazine, book or newspaper, by the time you’ve got to the 6th iteration you’re basically 90% as slick as the “professionals”. Before you start, it all looks quite hard, then you discover it’s quite easy… and then you discover the last 10% is very hard (at which point you either hire a professional or get very naturally talented).
Go make.
Ok, so what did my second iteration get me?
Well, on the trivial front I tweaked the position of the word “the” on the cover moving it down a little bit, probably a touch too far. A 3rd iteration would certainly see that moved up a couple of mm :) I also threw an issue number on there.
Inside is where most of the changes happened…
With the last issue I got the page dimensions wrong, I used the sizing for a colour newspaper, which is smaller in height than the B&W ones so I wasn’t making full use of the page.
I pushed the font down to 9pt from 14pt. When working on the screen 14pt looked fine and 9pt way too small, but that’s because I’m used to working on webpages which are tending towards larger and larger type anyway. And then there’s a step up to 5 columns from 4.
I was surprised to find out that combined those changes took the pages down from 24 pages to just 12. While it looks much better the loss in weight is a shame. The 24 page paper felt like a good hefty chunk of reading, 12 is feeling a little on the light side.
The other things added was bylines, captions and credits on photos and better design on mid-article headlines and the like…
I think it’s those final additions that tip it towards looking more “professional” than amateur (for this type of newsy-newspaper anyway). There was more breathing space around the page elements, but the columns of text themselves were good and dense.
From this point, given another 3 iterations for things like page numbers/headings, slightly better layout and maybe adverts to fill those empty space/pad pages ;) (and standard newspaper cover) I’m pretty sure it’d look indistinguishable at first or even second glance from a “real” newspaper.
But, because that’s how I roll, I think it’s really at the point where the next step is deconstruction of what a (weekly) newspaper is. As mentioned last time, these are articles that have had an online presence. Because of the print cycle these are things that have lived online for up-to a week already, gathering comments, links, responses, re-tweets, and context. Lets just skip straight to the play stage.
With digital presses getting cheaper and faster there’s a convergence-a-coming, and so no better time for play.
Boing Boing Covers used under Creative Commons License from Mark Frauenfelder
If the previous week was week of The Long Good Read paper edition and complaining about InDesign, then last week was the week it went ‘lectronic.
I obviously love printing papers but there’s also something pretty good about reaching the end of the week, grabbing all the posts from The Long Good Read and turning them round into a kindle publication in about an hour for the weekend.
There’s also the benefit of easy distribution and in theory subscription models. Again there’s a lot more work to be done to get to the point of push-button publishing. But it’s certainly a lot easier with the Kindle as there’s layout issues to worry about.
At the moment this is still just a “document” that taps a couple of the Kindle’s features. In that is has a Cover page, and a Table of Contents page that the Kindle recognises as such giving you the option to jump to them. And an understanding of each article being a different “section” which allows it to put little spots on the progress bar at the bottom.
But when I look at Newspapers on the Kindle they have this nice(ish) front-page that shows you the sections and articles for each section, and quick easy links at the foot of the page for jumping around quickly.
It would be nice to have access to some of that, once again I assume that either involves reading some Docs or nice people at Amazon who specialise in bringing Newspapers over to the Kindle say things like “Don’t worry, we’ll set all that up for you, let us handle it”
Which would be annoying. The plan is to find out… don’t. know. enough. must. accumulate. knowledge.
Ummm, also did this and that, not a terribly interesting week on the other things front. Mainly streamlining python code on Google App Engine and adding in logging and stuff. All generally geared towards the stuff I’m doing this week, which I’ll sort-of-kind-of cover in next weeks’ week notes.
Which reminds me…
Must get weeknotes back to happening on a Monday, were they at least make more sense as they’re not right in the middle of thinking about what’s happening this week.
Days late with week notes: 2
Awesomeness of the long good read kindle cover: much