mattwaite.com

You know journalism is in trouble when you know this: I'm being invited to teach a class at a respected journalism school. The fun part, and not a very surprising part given the state of the industry right now, is that neither they nor I have a really solid idea what the class is going to be. The class will start in the fall of 2010, so we have time to figure it out.

Obviously, given what I do now, they're not asking me to give a seminar on modern American narrative. I'm a journalist who builds ...

So there was a little news around here lately. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize. To say I'm still in shock is an understatement. A week later, it doesn't seem real.

All week long, we've been talking about how PolitiFact started, how it all came together. It's been fun remembering how it started out with Bill Adair having an idea and me having an idea on how we could pull it off. The crude mock-ups, the development environment on a box that was headed for the trash. I still can't believe we did it. But out ...

On every web project I've worked, one of the key/top/vital priorities was to make sure that Google could index every single last word of the site so that if someone was searching for what we had, they'd find it. My most recent project turned that on its head.

What if you don't want Google to index everything? What if you only want Google to index this, but not that?

The project where this came up was Tampa Bay Mug Shots, a site that displays the mug shots of people booked into county jails in three ...

I ran into a problem in Django that I'd never encountered before this morning: I had a really huge number to store. Tens of billions huge. Postgres and MySQL's integer fields won't store a number that big. They have a field type of bigint, but if you're writing Django models, there's no corresponding bigint field type. There's just an integer.

Turns out, it's really simple to make your own bigint field type. I found out how buried deep in a Trac entry on this. I post it here to help anyone else out ...

This blog has been quiet of late because I've been working in every spare moment I have on a couple of projects that are going to launch soon, good lord willing and the creek don't rise. Given that I'm sleep deprived, stressed and generally ground down to a nub, it's a bad, bad time for me to read my media-heavy RSS feeds.

Before I get myself into trouble, I just want to say this: If all these people who know so much about journalism on the web spent less time on waving their arms in hysterics ...