The utility belt approach to journalism and development

Ever since I’ve been involved with the ideas of online/digital/data (delete as appropriate) journalism – I’ve been using the metaphor of Batman’s utility belt as a way of thinking about a journalist’s skillet and how it can evolve over time.

Rather than a rucksack full of tools, the Caped Crusader was able to easily change items in and out of his belt pouches to solve the issue at hand.

The constant debates about the skills required to operate in a mediasphere that has rapidly change and will continue to do so for some time to come (unless the departures of Simon Waldman and Will Lewis should have all of us involved in paid journalism worried) have brought me back to this idea.

A while ago some 79 people kindly helped answer a mini survey around this core idea of what skills journalists need. I posted up quick graphs of the responses in a Flickr set, but haven’t had a chance to get to grips with the full responses… yet. (If you fancy getting in on the act, I’ve not closed the survey.)

But one question I asked was: how important do you feel programming and development are? Read more

May 10, 2010 | Filed Under Hacking for hacks, Journalism, elearning | Comments 

Rapid development and journalism projects

WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

As a long term Wordpress user I’m a bit biased when it comes to simple, out-of-the-box CMS software. I’m currently starting to play around with the coding required to make themes work for a number of personal and work-related projects. I’ll be collating links and sharing Wordpress hacks as I go along.

One of the simplest things I’ve found, that has made my life a lot easier, were suggestions for a virtual development server. As a Mac user I know that I’ve got one built in – and have used Terminal to play around with Django, which meant kicking in the server. But this was a little complicated.

After a bit of digging, I found suggestions for using MAMP (Mac) and XAMP (Windows) as a dev server – so I can hack around to my heart’s content.

The only issue I found was working out the web address for the project – the MAMP site left me scratching my head, so I did a bit of searching on how to set up MAMP for a Wordpress install.

Basically you drop your site into the appropriate MAMP folder and set up the Wordpress config file as per the instructions. Then just run the installer at http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

I’ve started digging around in the theme folder – I’m currently looking at magazine-style themes and looking at Arthemia and Scarlett, both of which offer some interesting possibilities but neither of which quite do what I’d like them to do. Hence the reason for starting to hack around.

Starting points

I’m currently reading .net magazine’s issue 199 which has a good article on Wordpress and an old .net article on Wordpress Themes for Designers.

Related links

Digging into Wordpress

WP Recipes

WP Engineer

Wordpress Tavern

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February 3, 2010 | Filed Under Hacking for hacks | Comments