Tag: 2011 guilt reduction project

Reintroducing Newstangle, or How I learned to stop worrying and love my blog

Ryan Sholin2 Comments

Let’s skip the usual rambling, expository introduction and get to the lists:

  1. Delicious is dying. Or it isn’t. Or it is. Depends on who you ask, I suppose.
  2. I like saving and tagging and sharing links. You may have noticed I worked for a company that made some tools to do that sort of thing.
  3. I’m having a hard time trusting any of the also-ran social bookmarking sites with my data.
  4. For a long time now, I’ve had intentions to implement some form of WordPress “Asides” on my blog, to use in conjunction with the “Press This” bookmarklet for light linkblogging.

The desired outcome:

  1. A handsome little way to display Asides on my blog. For the sake of this discussion, let’s just call all the “Asides” posts something like “Newstangle.”
  2. All of my Delicious links, minus some outdated stuff, imported to WordPress as posts with their tags intact.
  3. Some light repair and merging of tags.
  4. A page displaying all my Newstangle posts and tags in some sort of useful, browsable way.
  5. Perhaps a search box just for the Newstangle content.
  6. To send out automatic-ish tweets when I post a Newstangle link that lead to the link in question, and not my blog post about it.
  7. To point Newstangle.com at the Newstangle links over here.

So far: I’m done with steps 1, 2, 3, and 7. Halfway done with 4, really.

Not bad for an over-coffee-and-breakfast project, right?

Ingredients:

  • AsideShop for a pretty easy way to implement a version of Asides without messing around with templates. I’m a sucker for any plugin that lets me use tokens like %post_permalink% with my own markup, rather than getting too deep into PHP copy/paste missions.
  • The particular Delicious to WordPress Importer I used was an updated version of this one, and predated this other one, which even comes with a handy theme to make it more like Delicious. Your mileage will definitely vary.
  • Batch Cat to help clean up some of the damage I did importing more than 2,500 links to my default post category, which I actually use.
  • Tag Managing Thing, an oldie-but-a-goodie plugin for editing, merging, and deleting post tags.
  • And when I get around to adding some interesting tag listing ont he Newstangle category page, I might use some variation of the cool back-of-the-book index-style Archives template that came with my new Basic Maths theme.

It remains to be seen, of course, if I can stick with it, posting short links and notes on a regular basis, mixing in longer posts — perhaps about something other than this blog at some point — more frequently than I have of late.

Now then. What’s all this I hear about Flickr?

The Inbox Zero Thing

Ryan Sholin2 Comments

I really, really, really, dislike “productivity” books. And gurus. And methods. And things that can generally be characterized as dogmatic.

But I like this.

My empty inbox.

I know I’m late to this party, but for years, I thought Inbox Zero was some sort of Getting Things Done-related madness involving a lot of folders and filters and whatnot.

But no, it’s not that complicated. And Merlin Mann does a great job of making it palatable, even digestible, to extend the metaphor a little deeper into the gut.

Start here, and read everything under the “Posts in the Inbox Zero series” heading before you start mashing your mouse. It won’t take you more than an hour or two to get started.

Basic Maths for Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin3 Comments

Believe it or not, I’ve redesigned this blog, yet again.

Well, sort of.

Ahem, more accurate:

Believe it or not, I purchased the Basic Maths WordPress theme by Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole.

So here’s the deal. I’m tired of redesigning this blog. For more than five years, yes, it’s been my primary — albeit periodic — sandbox to learn and practice my thin layer of front-end skills. But that process also became an excuse not to write.

“Oh, yes, I’ll definitely get back to blogging lots as soon as I finish the redesign! It’s going to be awesome!”

No. It might have been “awesome” in some theoretical corner of my mind, but what it would never be was “finished.”

So rather than fool myself yet again, as I had started to do with a modified Twenty-Ten theme that I was not nimble enough to set up as a child theme, leading to the tearing of garments and gnashing of the teeth when a recent WordPress update included updates to Twenty-Ten’s stylesheet… I have opted to drop a really small number of dollars for a wildly valuable and handsome theme.

Which I have already begun to customize, but not much. And as a child theme. Lesson learned.

For those of you too lazy to click through from Google Reader, a glance:

There are still plenty of tweaks I want to make, one at a time, over my morning coffee, for the most part, but I like where this is going.

I have a rough notion of how to use WordPress/PressThis/Asides/widgets to produce an interesting stream of the sort of short link-and-comment posts that I’ve used Delicious/Publish2/Instapaper for over the last several years, so stay tuned for a barrage of little things along those lines.

And honest, more actual writing.

With any luck, this blog post is the first in a series on some stuff I’m doing as 2011 starts, to reduce the amount of guilt I let orbit around my skull and the Internets. Actually, it’s the second post in the series, which includes the bit about shutting down ReportingOn.

So long, ReportingOn

Ryan Sholin8 Comments

In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content, not craft, or process, or skillset.

I taught myself enough Django — and sought out advice from friends and coworkers with little regard for their interest or priorities — to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn 2.0 launched.

And almost immediately, I stepped away from it, buried in the responsibilities of my day job, family, and other projects. To grow and evolve, and really, to race ahead of the internal and external communication tools already available to reporters, ReportingOn needed far more time, attention, and dedication than I could give it.

Yesterday, I shut down ReportingOn.

In its last state, it only cost a few bucks a month to maintain, but it has more value at this point as a story, or a lesson, or a piece of software than it has as a working site.

To head off a couple questions at the pass:

  1. No, you can’t export your questions or answers or profile data. None of you have touched the site in about a year, so I don’t think you’re that interested in exporting anything. But if you’re some sort of webpackrat that insists, I have the database, and I can certainly provide you with your content.
  2. Yes, the source code for the application is still available, and you’re more than welcome to take a stab at building something interesting with it. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”

  • Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
  • Unless they’re looking for sources.
  • There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
  • When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
  • Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.

As for the problem ReportingOn set out to solve, it’s still out there.

Connecting the dots among far-flung newsrooms working on stories about the same issue is something that might happen internally in a large media company, or organically in the wilds of Twitter, but rarely in any structured way that makes it easy to discover new colleagues, peers, and mentors. Sure, there are e-mail lists, especially for professional associations (think: SEJ) that act as backchannels for a beat, but not enough, and not focused on content.

(Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.)

As for me, I’m working on another (even) small(er) Knight-funded side project a few minutes at a time these days. Watch for news about that one in the coming weeks.

Here’s what a “beat” page looked like. Note the PR/spam in need of a “flag as PR/spam” button.

Here’s a single question page. (Thanks Joey, Chris, etc.)

Here’s a profile page. (Thanks, Greg.)