48 items tagged “guardian”
2009
Drug seizures: how pure is street cocaine? Neat story on the Guardian Datablog using graphs from Timetric to show that while the purity of cocaine seized by customs over the past five years has stayed constant, the purity of drugs seized by the police has been trending downwards.
#DataJourn part 1: a new conversation. Journalism.co.uk report on the first instance of a Guardian story that was driven by an external developer’s work with data originally released on our Datablog.
Automating PowerPoint with Python. Useful tutorial on using ActivePython’s win32com module to automate PowerPoint. The example code pulls in the top 50 banks by assets from the Guardian Data Store and generates a treemap using PowerPoint’s shape drawing primitives.
UK Guardian Data + ManyEyes = ISAF Troops Contribution Story. Including a heat map showing countries that are contributing the most troops to Afghanistan.
Tracking UK Liberal Indecency. The mashup I’ve been waiting for: Tom Hume used the Guardian Content API to track swearword usage over time.
My Guardian OpenPlatform API’n’Data Hacks’n’Mashups Roundup. Superb collection of Guardian Open Platform mashups from Tony Hirst, all of which use free online tools such as Yahoo! Pipes and Many Eyes. We invited Tony in to give a tech talk at the Guardian last week.
Get our full university data. “The Guardian’s university rankings are the most visited part of Education Guardian”—and now they’re available as a spreadsheet.
Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation. Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles.
I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid.
A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
This morning we launched the Guardian Open Platform at a well attended event in our new offices in Kings Place. This is one of the main projects I’ve been helping out with since joining the Guardian last year, and it’s fantastic to finally have it out in the open.
[... 839 words]Oscars 2009: the interactive results | guardian.co.uk. My latest project for the Guardian, put together on very short notice. Updates live as the results are announced, and allows Twitter users to vote on their favourite for each category by sending a specially formatted message to @guardianfilm—jQuery and Ajax polling against S3 under the hood.
2008
Hack Day at the Guardian. Video of the demos from the first Hack Day at the Guardian. I presented a crowdsourcing app I used to collect annotations for an SVG map of the UK.
Inside guardian.co.uk: Upgrading our RSS feeds. The Guardian now offers full-content RSS feeds of pretty much everything for which we have the necessary rights (no ads yet, but they’ll be added soon). Adding “/rss” to the URL in various places on the site will get you feeds for sections, subjects, contributors and more.
New authentication schemes such as OpenID, or Microsoft's CardSpace, may help as adoption increases. These systems make it possible to register for one site using credentials verified by another. Instead of having many sites with poor verification procedures, the internet could have a few sites with strong verification procedures, that are then used by others. The advantage for the user is that they no longer have to jump through multiple hoops for each new site they encounter.
— Tim Anderson, in the Guardian
Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk (via) The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.
Back to full-time employment
I’ve been freelance for a year and a half now, and it’s been a great deal of fun. For me, being freelance meant having the freedom to pursue all sorts of different interests—technical writing, public speaking, Django, OpenID, JavaScript—and the opportunity to work with some really fantastic people.
[... 181 words]Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture. How the team at guardian.co.uk used Domain-Driven Design in their recent two year rebuild. The core of DDD is having end users involved with domain modeling, which results in a shared domain language that should be understood by everyone involved.
2007
Top 10 dotcoms to watch. From the Guardian—Dopplr and Moo both get a mention.