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 ...

Everything you need to know about using Twitter for marketing and PR is at this very descriptive url:

http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/

That’s right: Don’t. Don’t use Twitter for marketing.

Why?

Let me draw a comparison for you: What would you call someone who uses a program to automatically send you an annoying volume of email? A spammer. So what makes you think that because it’s 140 characters and on some trendy web service that blasting away with soulless and automatic links isn’t spam?

So that’s why I say automated means to add content ...

The luxury of losing your whole site twice to server failures is that you get to pick and choose which of your old posts gets restored. So, with that in mind, I've restored some of the 2007 posts that were still relevant, including the original announcement of PolitiFact (here). If you're really bored, here's the by-month archive of them.

Mark Potts had some nice things to say about the new version of PolitiFact that we recently launched. But one of the things he wrote I wanted to amplify:

None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn't follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and ...

If you're reading this via RSS feed, you might want to check which one. A while back, I thought it would be cool to know how many RSS subscribers I had so I added my feed to Feedburner. Given that the latest updates took more than 24 hours to appear in the Feedburner feed, I'm discontinuing it.

The new feed address is here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I know. I should know better. And I should.

And I know. I should have been quicker getting back online. And I should have.

But I didn't. And I wasn't.

And now I'm finally back from the dead.

I lost the first version of this blog - a self-hosted Wordpress install - when my hosting company lost the database and the backup of the database, which was stupidly stored on the same drive. After ridding myself of them, I moved over to a hand-crafted Django blog hosted by Slicehost. Like an idiot, I didn't spring for the $5 ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

I've been meaning to post my notes from DjangoCon since I got back but haven't had time. Now with the posting of the DjangoCon sessions on YouTube , I'm fresh out of excuses. Now it's an annoated guide to the sessions I attended and took notes on.

Reusable Apps: James Bennett

Pound for pound, this was ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

I've launched a new app at work: Neighborhood Watch. We've got lots of plans for it, but at launch it focuses on home sales in over 200 neighborhoods in Pinellas and Pasco counties in the Tampa Bay area.

The seed for this app actually started in 2004, when I wrote this. At the time, we did 30 ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

The program for the very first DjangoCon is up and my name is on it. And it's not a typo. I'm speaking at the very first DjangoCon.

My three reactions, in rough order:

1. I am so excited I can't even tell you.

2. I am so honored it's ridiculous.

3. I am so scared ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

There's a group of fellow journalists who are getting really sick of what we're calling Wordpress Heroes. What is a Wordpress Hero? Back home, we'd call them All Hat and No Cattle. A Wordpress Hero is someone smart enough to setup a blog and fire away with grand ideas, but too dumb to use things like ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

First, the grains of salt:

• I don’t live in an EveryBlock city. I think a key part of EveryBlock is the visceral connection you have with your neighborhood. I don’t have that, so view my comments with that in mind.


• Huge Adrian Holovaty fan. Huge Django fan. Big believer in breaking out of the story centric worldview ...