Tag: CMS

Elsewhere, recently, blogging

Ryan Sholin2 Comments

Remember when I remembered blogging? Hard to believe that was almost four months ago, but there it is. Meanwhile…

Here’s what I did after I posted that real live actual blog post on my blog here at ryansholin.com:

  1. I wrote a Medium post from my phone. It was about Sleater-Kinney and writing and content management systems. And about writing on phones. (Not too long after, Medium updated lots of features, including their mobile writing/editing screens, so some of this was happily and quickly made totally invalid.)
  2. I wrote a Kinja post from my phone. It was about tacos and emoji and terrible garbage data. And writing on phones.
  3. I wrote a Tumblr post from my phone. It was about beach vacations and long books and reading habits. And writing on phones.
  4. That aforementioned Medium update happened, and in the process of trying it out, I wrote a “brief” guide to things like Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP and the stuff Medium was launching and it was “fun,” but also actual publishing labor. I can’t remember if I drafted any part of this on my phone, but maybe.
  5. Writing in Medium was remarkably pleasant, and they’re proving to be a really powerful platform for driving engagement with push notifications, at least until everyone gets annoyed and turns them off, and also we’ve been listening to the Hamilton cast album non-stop (get it?), so I wrote a thing about what Product Managers can learn from Hamilton the Musical. And that really was fun, no scare quotes.

An aside: ALSO OTHER THINGS ARE HAPPENING.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been writing about. More to come. Medium has been fun.

One new development related to all these thoughts about content management systems for actual writing: WordPress is doing something lots of people are doing, moving to fancy modern node.js frameworks for publishing tools, not just for what I would usually call reader-facing UX.

As a matter of fact, even though I don’t quite understand how this works, I’m typing this very blog post in what I have to assume is the new node.js powered framework on WordPress.com, which hopefully is going to publish as intended on ryansholin.com, which still runs using the standard latest dot-org build.

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Snapshots from the future of online student news

Ryan Sholin6 Comments

Those of you (er, both of you) who have been following this blog since its outset (onset?) in February 2005 will recall that I first got involved with the actual production of online news at the Spartan Daily, the student newspaper of San Jose State University, where I remain a graduate student, believe it or not.

I walked into Prof. Richard Craig‘s office one day in the summer of 2005 and said “Why isn’t there an RSS feed for the Daily?” and he and the other advisers and Daily-adjacent faculty members basically gave me the keys to the site and told me to go out and do whatever I could to improve it.

It turned out that adding an RSS feed was easy, but my interest — and sudden new role as the contact for the hosting and CMS provider (back then it was a company called Digital Partners) — led me to my first news site redesign, turning the Daily’s site into something slightly more pleasant to look at.

I think I must have taken a few independent study credits and the title of Webmaster the next semester.  I wasn’t the Online Editor, whose job at that point in time was mostly to do a lot of painful copy/paste webmonkey work very late at night, but I helped the staff try to figure out a little bit about what more they could do with the system.

Digital Partners was promptly swallowed up by College Publisher, and I redesigned the site again, with the excuse of porting it over to a new CMS and hosting system.  It was fun, and I was working with the incoming Online Editor, Shaminder Dulai, who started driving multimedia into the story count requirements at the Daily. (And then Daniel Sato and Neal Waters redesigned it.  And then Kyle Hansen redesigned it.  It should be redesigned every semester if there’s a student or two with a passion for online news design, and if you don’t have one or two of those around, something’s wrong. )

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This is all just to say that after working with a few versions of the dominant CMS/hosting tool for college newspapers, I came to the following conclusions:

  1. If all you’re interested in teaching or learning is content production, College Publisher is fine.  Stories, comments, blogs (?), video, photos — it can handle all that.  I’m pretty sure embeddable tools work as well.  But those are the limits.
  2. If you’re interested in teaching or learning anything at all about Web design, development, user interaction, interactivity, Flash-based multimedia or graphics, or community management, you need something more flexible than a turnkey solution.

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Once you get past that, you’re loose in the touchy and complicated world of how/why/when/where to deploy some sort of open source software and server setup that students can manage — and far more importantly, that the next student staff can manage.  And the next one.  And the next.

I’ve been excited to see a few projects appear in recent months to address that issue, and get past it.  Here’s the best I’ve seen, so far:

  • The Populous Project: This Knight News Challenge winning project intends to build a fully featured three-phase system for student (and small town?) news, from CMS to a front-end newsroom system for print and online, to a social networking tool to add on to news sites.  This project is based at the UCLA Daily Bruin, where they’re coding up a prototype in Django which they plan to open-source.
  • CoPress: This collective project features a bunch of online news students and recent graduates that I know from around the Web, and they’re applying for a Knight News Challenge grant this year. (Sense a theme here?)  Check out their answers to my questions about their proposal.  The gang at CoPress knows exactly what a student paper needs to get their jobs done and be innovative at the same time, and you can see that in their list of Ideal CMS Features, which includes things like the need for a system that plays well with InDesign and IPTC data.

(For a sense of what’s possible when you break out of the College Publisher mold and go your own way, check out the WordPress-powered Miami Hurricane.)

My most important questions for any student media CMS project have to do with scalability and repeatability:

How easy will this CMS be to host, given the variety of university and external systems in play at student media outlets with a wide range of organizational structures?

How easy will this CMS be to maintain for a steady flow of students through a newsroom, year after year?