Thinkcorps

I just finished up a super-simple view of the New York Times that answers a simple question: What’s new?

SimplerTimes, What’s New at The New York Times
http://simplertimes.smithmag.net

The Backstory

All I wanted was a simple page where I could see what’s new at the NYT. I’m a bit of a news/blogs junkie, and I check my feeds throughout the day. However, in the case of the Times, I check a few regular sections in the morning, but then only return to the homepage. There’s so much I knew I was missing, but I didn’t feel like digging through the site or subscribing to a whole mess of RSS feeds.

Separately, it’s been bugging me that newspapers are still hanging on to the idea of “editions” on their Web site (an always-on medium, if there ever was one). The editors program the day’s news, package it up into an updated homepage, and voila! Success! Eureka! Brilliant! Their job is done! Their paychecks justified.

Unless I visit their site more than once a day.

At which point, I’ve already seen all those homepage stories, and I’m looking for something new. Which I can’t find anywhere, because it’s all buried in a mess of sections and categories. So here I am: a voracious reader, at your site, ready to engage with whatever you’ve got — and you give me nothing.

So i decided to take a stab at fixing it. SimplerTimes is my little experiment to create a reader’s view of the news. It’s what I expected from MyTimes, but didn’t get.

The site is very simple. You simply click on the “Categories” link to customize the sections you want to see. Click “Update” and your preferences are saved in a cookie. The page now lists recent articles from the sections you’re interested in.

Articles with a red flag are brand new within the past 2 hours, articles with a yellow flag have been published today. Just a few simple visual cues to help you navigate your way down the page, until you decide you’re done and there’s nothing more to see.

I’ve also included “Top Stories” articles on the first page. These come from the NYTimes Home Page feed. This way, I still get a taste of what the NYTimes feels is important today. So now we’ve flipped the balance of power, the main content is personalized, and the sidebar is editor-driven. I think I like it better this way.

The concept is very simple and can be extended in any number of ways.

• The categories are all feeds from the NYTimes (pulled from their OPML file, though, inexplicably, not ALL their feeds are in that file). The feeds could come from any number of sources.


• The displayed content is very limited, with better data in the feed, you’d have more options for how to display it


• I wanted to use Thickbox to display the article in an iframe on the page, but NYT uses an iframe breakout script. Bah, no fun at all.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary here. You can certainly add each feed to your newsreader and get the same effect (without the css elements of course). But there’s something compelling to me about reconstituting all this RSS data back into a Web page that’s been customized just for me.

Every once in a while, I get an idea. I’d been walking past Powell’s technical bookstore and they had a rack full of these punch-out wood puzzle kits that made different things: heavy machinery, navy ships, etc. I figured I could do something cool with them, being that they’re basically 3D puzzle kits.

I only had to fabricate two pieces (from puzzle pieces I wasn’t going to use), so it’s pretty much all snap-together. The two pieces formed the top and bottom of the cage surrounding the light bulb.

Unlike most other projects I’ve done, this one was mostly about staring at the pieces and thinking about how they could fit together. I actually let it sit, hanging above my workspace for about a week, coming back to it every day for a few minutes. Eventually, I stumbled upon a set of combinations that I liked, at which point I took a bunch of pictures for reference, then glued it together for stability.

I put up a few more pictures on Flickr.

DialedIn was an experiment in aggregating local bloggers to provide an alternative view of city life. I built the system to run more or less automatically once the data sources have been picked. The system as it stands now pulls in blog feeds, news feeds, Flickr photos, and iCal calendars. It’s kind of a one-stop shop for local community information. [update: i shut the service down until i find a new webhost.]
What I ended up with is very similar to the FeedWordpress project. There are some things that I’ve done differently, and some that I would have added in if I’d been seriously pushing the system the way Charles has been. But it’s good enough for me as a proof on concept, and I don’t like releasing code to the public because I’m not willing and/or able to support it.

This project combined my love of RSS feeds and Wordpress, and gave me additional insight into how flexible Wordpress is. As I continue to understand WP’s API, I really like how you can extend the program’s functionality through plugins (leveraging both PHP and Javascript).

Oh, and if you look, you can see that I integrated a cool weather plugin right into the interface. I think I’m actually most proud of that. The simple design I developed uses a prominent feature of the cityscape in the header and puts a current weather image right over it. I love the idea of infographics integrated into the site design—and it’s so basic! If you mousover the image you get additional data. It certainly doesn’t show off any programming skills, more dumb luck really, but I’ll take it. :>

We needed new shelves for our place, and Patricia was kinda set on the Blu Dot Chicago shelves (see ‘em here at dwr.com) although they are most definitely out of our price range at $1,600. We noodled around for some other options like this or this. But after Ikea wanted to charge me $198 shipping for a $149 bookcase, I decided that maybe DIY was the best path.

(Despite this conclusion, I remain firmly committed to purchasing some Cubitec shelving in the near future. Just so you know.)

After some thinking, I realized that the Chicago shelves would be really easy to make—it’s just 8 boxes—if I could just find a solution for the long legs that run the height of the piece. I considered just getting some 1”x1” stock in a cheap wood, but the presence of metal legs really seems important to the piece. But where am I going to find metal legs? I thought of pipe, but that seemed too complicated and expensive when you add in all the fittings you’d need. Plus, I’d have fittings lined up on either side of each shelf board—aligning them would be a pain and probably look silly.

What I settled on was threaded rod, I bought 3/8” stock in 6ft lengths from my local Ace Hardware for $4/each. I cleaned out the two stores in my ‘hood, btw. Patricia and I spent 20 minutes counting out all the couplers, nuts, and washers I’d need. I’m using elevator bolts for feet.
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I got heavily addicted to my RSS reader for a while, then decided that 1) I was wasting way too much time, and 2) I liked reading most articles in their natural Web environments.

One night several days ago, I was up late reading a magazine called Cabinet. There was a really interesting art project called VSSTV, very slow scan television, in which a video picture is printed using a plotter-type printer with red, blue, and green ink-filled syringes. The syringes fill the bubbles in a sheet of bubblewrap. It’s super-low res and prints out a frame every 20 hours or so.
(VSST is an art hack on SSTV, which is TV over ham radio.)

I thought, hey, why not try that over RSS? So, I deconstructed a relatively small image into its constituent pixel rgb values, and every 2 hours, I generate an RSS feed that contains the coordinates and rgb values for 30 pixels. With the new feed, I also update a new, reconstituted image.

The image will be fully reconstructed in one year.

:: for patricia ::
(i decided that this would make a nice gift of sorts for my girlfriend, patricia. thus, the name)