Idea Lab

ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source. (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.) The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that...

• July 2, 2009
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Why ReportingOn Launched on Django

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out. Last time I wrote about the options I was considering for Web development, I was leaning toward Django and away from Drupal. Here's why I gave up on Drupal for this project and moved on to Django: Drupal is a fantastic content management system out of the box, with little --...

• October 3, 2008
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Exploring a Range of Development Options

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past few weeks, I've ramped up development of ReportingOn. Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again. Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately: Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source...

• June 30, 2008
• 8 comments