Simon Willison's Weblog: atmedia

Doing Local Right

2007-06-11T22:46:18+00:00

"Doing Local Right" was the title of my talk at this year's @media Europe. Patrick had asked me if I could put together a case study, and I jumped at the chance to share some of the work of my former colleagues at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. I had the privilege of working at the newspaper for a year in late 2003-2004.

I started the talk by introducing two semi-related problems. The first is that the local search offerings from the big Internet companies are pretty poor - it's difficult to tell how comprehensive or accurate their business listings are, and they lack any sense of the flavour that real local knowledge can provide.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry is stuck in a self-declared state of crisis, with classified advertising decimated by free online listings and the bulk of their stories (taken from the same wire services as every other paper) quickly becoming a commodity.

Newspapers and local websites are a perfect match. Newspapers have the reporters, the relationships and the resources to provide better coverage of their local areas than anyone else could even dream of. That's exactly what the team at the Lawrence Journal-World have spent the past five years doing.

I only had 25 minutes for the talk, so I concentrated on www.lawrence.com, www.ljworld.com and www.ljworld.com/marketplace. Lawrence.com is my favourite of the three: it's the local entertainment site that every city in the world needs, but very few actually have. I covered the following features:

A comprehensive events calendar (with editorially selected "best bets")
Blogs by local residents
Movie listings for local cinemas (with links to the reviews by both newspaper staff and members of the public)
Detailed event coverage, including additional dates, weather forecasts for outdoor events in the next few days and an SMS/e-mail reminder service
Gig listings that incorporate MP3 downloads ("if you go, you might hear") from the 1,000+ MP3s of local bands hosted by the site
Drink specials, which also appear on relevant event and venue pages
The local band and music database, browseable by band, musician, genre and more
The local restaurant listings, including kitchen hours (and hence the infamous restaurants open right now)
The downloads page, which combines data from all over the site to present MP3s for download that are by bands which are playing gigs in the next week ("see 'em live at the Bottleneck")

The point I was trying to make (one which I've seen Adrian Holovaty make many times) is that if you take good care of your data you can slice and dice it in dozens of unexpected ways.

Next up was LJWorld.com, which the team re-launched last month. The new site continues the trend of user comments on pretty much everything, and I demonstrated the funky new multimedia page which again illustrates the value of rich data models. The election results coverage and "Minors in possession" special report also got a mention.

The final site I talked about was Marketplace, the brand new business directory listing over 4,000 local companies. It can provide a map of all the chiropractors in town, along with their opening hours and contact details. Individual business listings can include events, photos, coupons, even video ads. Business owners can claim their listings and add more information to them; one restaurant uploaded photos of their entire menu.

I concluded with a few points on how you can go around building sites like this, including the "wouldn't it be cool if..." development process and the importance of cheap labour (interns!) to reliably populating your database. I also threw in a plug for Django; the automatic admin interface was developed especially to support the fast pace of development at the Journal-World.

I finished up with a plug for the blogs of some of the current team, all well worth a look.

Full download (PDF) available from slideshare.

Tags: atmedia, atmedia07, atmedia2007, kansas, lawrence, ljworld, local, newspapers, speaking, my-talks, annotated-talks

@media 2007 writeup from AlastairC

2007-06-11T00:24:40+00:00

@media 2007 writeup from AlastairC

Good notes on a bunch of sessions, including mine.

Tags: alastairc, atmedia, atmedia07, atmedia2007, speaking

Doing Local Right

2007-06-09T19:31:03+00:00

Doing Local Right

The slides from my presentation at @media 2007.

Tags: atmedia, atmedia07, atmedia2007, django, lawrence, ljworld, local, my-talks

Notes on JavaScript Libraries

2006-06-26T15:03:00+00:00

@media 2006 was a blast. Great talks, great people and some of the highest production values I've ever seen at a conference (check out the bags!).

I sat on the JavaScript Libraries: Friend or Foe? panel, with PPK, Dan Webb, Stuart Langridge and Cameron Adams chairing. It was my first participation in a panel and I really enjoyed it - I've always liked the Q&A bit of giving talks. JavaScript Libraries are an enormous topic but I felt we did them justice considering the time available. For the record, here are the key points that I wanted to get across:

Large JavaScript applications need some kind of library - even if it's one built especially for that application. There are a number of problems in JavaScript (most of them originating with browser incompatibilities) that any moderately complex application will need to deal with - things like normalised event handling, DOM node selection, sane animation or drag and drop. Solve these problems once so you can get on to the interesting task of building the application. If you can find a library that solves them for you so much the better!
The big four. Dojo, MochiKit, Prototype/Scriptaculous and the Yahoo! UI Library are the top of the pile as far as I'm concerned. They cover the bases effectively and each one offers something interesting that makes it worth studying in its own right. If you plan to evaluate some existing libraries these make an excellent starting point.
Leaky abstractions. Joel Spolsky's essay The Law of Leaky Abstractions is my favourite of all of his online articles. It's basic tenet is that abstractions that are designed to save the programmer time inevitably leak, and if they leak at a lower level of abstraction than the programmer is familiar with they prove almost impossible to debug. Paradoxically, the more time saving abstractions you are using the more you actually have to know.

JavaScript is possibly the leakiest abstraction of them all, thanks to the many different browser environments it runs in. If you rely on a library to abstract away the browser bugs from you you are certain to run in to a bug that you can't fix sooner or later. Don't use libraries as crutches; if you're not prepared to figure out what the library is doing for you you'll end up in a world of pain further down the line.
Community and documentation matter. As with all open-source software, it's a good idea to get a feel for the amount of community activity around a project before you commit to building on it. The big four all have active communities, which means less bugs, more support and a faster rate of improvement. Likewise, good documentation is invaluable.
Libraries should play well with others. Reusable code that excludes other code from being reused has severely limited long-term value. In JavaScript, that means that libraries that mess with Object.prototype or pollute global namespaces should be treated with caution. The Prototype library was a major culprit here, but thankfully has cleaned up its act (at least with regards to altering Object.prototype) in recent releases. It's all very well saying that you'll always be using code built with your core language modifications in mind, but you may well change your tune when you try to incorporate Yahoo! or Google Maps and everything breaks.
Go with the grain. If you take the time to learn it properly, JavaScript is a powerful and surprisingly elegant language. Good JavaScript code takes advantage of its dynamic, functional nature. Libraries that promise to take the pain out of JavaScript by writing the code for you probably aren't as smart as they seem. Abstractions leak.

Dan Webb has a good comparison of the big four on SitePoint, although he did overlook YUI's Animation library which I consider a highlight.

For more accurate coverage of the @media panel itself, take a look at my co-worker Paul Hammond's detailed notes.

Tags: atmedia, dojo, javascript, libraries, mochikit, prototype-js, speaking, my-talks, yui

Speaking gigs

2006-05-01T23:23:21+00:00

I've been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK's Beers and Innovation series.

I've got a bunch more coming up. Here's my calendar for the next few months:

XTech 2006, May 16th-19th in Amsterdam

I'm chairing the Ajax Developers' Day, during which I'll also be giving a talk about the Yahoo! UI Library. The line-up for the day is pretty impressive, including representatives from a number of high-profile Ajax projects and a keynote by Alex Russell. I'm also giving a talk on Django later in the conference.

London JavaScript Night, May 25th, London

This is a night of talks that are in someway related to the JavaScript language. I'm giving an overview of the most important JavaScript libraries, how they compare and the general problems that they are trying to solve. The organisers are still looking for speakers, so drop them a line if you have something to share.

@media 2006, June 15th-16th, London

I'm on a panel with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge and Dan Webb talking about the benefits (and drawbacks) of JavaScript libraries.

I'm also hoping to speak at LUG Radio Live in July and d.Construct 2006 in September, topics undecided.

Finally, I'm heading to a couple of geeky social events this week: Pub Standards on Tuesday and London 2.0 RC 5 (the monthly Django/Python/Rails/Everything-else meetup) on Wednesday. Both events are fun, friendly and open to all.

Tags: atmedia, django, javascript, speaking, my-talks, xtech

Staying social

2005-06-03T13:56:33+00:00

June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won't be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn't stretch that far) but I'll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.

PPK (yes, that PPK) is hosting a JavaScript get-together in the afternoon at a Thames-side pub; confirmed attendees so far are PPK, myself, Stuart Langridge, Dean Edwards and Jeremy Keith but anyone else who wants to set the JavaScript world to rights is more than welcome to attend.

Planning a little further ahead, I'll be in and around San Francisco from the 11th to the 16th of July. My diary is more or less open at the moment, so if there's anything fun going on I'd love to hear about it.

Update: I almost forgot, I'm also attending the London Geek Dinner on the 7th of June. If you're interested, there are still 12 places left (out of 200).

Tags: atmedia, conferences, javascript, ppk