I'm excited to announce some huge news. EveryBlock, the project I've led for the last two years, has been acquired by MSNBC.com.
The main details are at the EveryBlock blog, but I wanted to mention a few other things here on my personal site, to try to anticipate [...]
It's a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:
1. Who cares?
2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.
[...]We've launched user accounts at EveryBlock, and we faced the interesting problem of needing to cache entire pages except for the "You're logged in as [username]" bit at the top of the page. For example, the Chicago homepage takes a nontrivial amount of time to generate and [...]
It's been a year and a half now since I've started working on EveryBlock, and I'm still having the time of my life. Starting from scratch in July 2007, our team of six has built a one-of-a-kind local news site that now serves 11 cities and makes more than [...]
I'm excited to announce that I'm working on a second edition of the Django Book.
The first edition, which I cowrote with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, was published in print by Apress more than a year ago, and, sadly, it's become out of date. It covers Django version 0.96, and many [...]
What is a "hyperlocal" Web site, precisely?
As with the term "Web 2.0," I've given up on defining it. Over the years, I've seen the term used to refer to Web sites that cover a metro area but organize their content by' [...]
Django, a project I have helped nurture for more than four years (including some time as a proprietary project when I worked at the Lawrence Journal-World) has today reached a milestone: we've given it a "1.0" status. In the world of open-source programming, this means it's stable,' [...]
We've just added two cities to EveryBlock: Charlotte and Philadelphia! I've written more over at the EveryBlock blog.
[...]Warning: Seriously geeky request ahead!
I'm looking for a way to render arbitrary Web pages -- including CSS and JavaScript -- and access the resulting DOM tree programatically, i.e., in an automated/headless fashion. I want to be able to ask the following questions of the resulting DOM tree:
For a given element,' [...]Django, a project I have helped nurture for more than four years (including some time as a proprietary project when I worked at the Lawrence Journal-World) has today reached a milestone: we've given it a "1.0" status. In the world of open-source programming, this means it's stable, [...]
We've just added two cities to EveryBlock: Charlotte and Philadelphia! I've written more over at the EveryBlock blog.
[...]Warning: Seriously geeky request ahead!
I'm looking for a way to render arbitrary Web pages -- including CSS and JavaScript -- and access the resulting DOM tree programatically, i.e., in an automated/headless fashion. I want to be able to ask the following questions of the resulting DOM tree:
Radiohead is holding a "contest" called Radiohead Remix, in which they're inviting fans to remix the song called "Nude" from their latest album. They've released the raw tracks -- separate, isolated audio clips of vocals, guitar, percussion, etc. -- and are encouraging people to remix the tracks to create [...]
Attention Python screen-scraping experts! We're looking to hire another full-time developer at EveryBlock. Our site, which just launched a few weeks ago, compiles a wealth of granular geographic data and publishes it on a block-by-block basis. We offer a distinct Web page (plus an RSS feed and e-mail alerts) [...]
Back in 2006, I had a very enjoyable interview with Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review. Now, Robert and I have gotten back together for another e-mail conversation about my latest project, EveryBlock: check it out.
And there's more! Earlier today, Rex Sorgatz published an interview with me [...]
It's here: EveryBlock. Check out our launch announcement for the details.
[...]Yesterday, I was interviewed over IM by Fabio Akita, a Web developer from Brazil. We had a good conversation about Python, Django and other various things, and Fabio has posted the transcript. There's also a Portuguese translation.
[...]It's here! At long last, the print copy of the Django Book has shipped. I received my author copies late last week and am still poking at them to make sure that, yes, a tangible book with my name on the cover has actually been printed, on real paper, by [...]
My life is complete. I have performed jazz on the stage of the Green Mill.
And here's the photo to prove it!
Thanks to Alfonso Ponticelli and Swing Gitan for allowing me to sit in for two songs ("Out of Nowhere" [...]
I've just released templatemaker, which is something I've been hacking on and off (mostly off) the past couple of months. It's a Python library for extracting data from similarly formatted text strings.
What the heck does that mean?
Well, say you want to get the raw data from a bunch of [...]
Since the freak event of being featured on the YouTube homepage, I've somehow amassed more than 600 subscribers to my YouTube channel. That, plus a lot of positive feedback, has inspired me to record and post more videos.
In the past few weeks, I've posted a bunch, including:
Along with my own big grant announcement, I'm excited about many of the other Knight News Challenge winners, most notably the grant given to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Medill received a grant to offer full journalism scholarships for geeks. Essentially, they're looking to train the next generation [...]
I'm thrilled to announce some huge news: I've been awarded a grant by the Knight Foundation, as part of the Knight News Challenge program.
I'll be founding a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making local news and information useful. I've been feeling the entrepreneurial itch for a while [...]
At work, we recently launched Campaign Tracker, a browsable database of campaign events planned by the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates. This is the latest section of The Presidential Field, washingtonpost.com's guide to the '08 presidential elections.
The site's goals are to compile as much information about candidates' travel [...]
Wow, somehow my MacGyver theme song video was selected to be the top featured video on YouTube's home page right now. A screenshot, for posterity:
I'm not sure what amuses me more -- the fact that the YouTube editors decided to feature this, or the immediate, [...]
Attention, Web developers! We're hiring somebody to work with me at washingtonpost.com.
We're looking for somebody who is really good at making dynamic Web applications, on deadline. You're a great candidate if:
