February 25, 2008; 12:12 am
Lately, the Convergency Room somehow got onto the list of blogs I check daily — perhaps it’s the relative frequency of posts that students are forced to write. Or perhaps I’m bracing myself for the pain that’s yet to come when I eventually take those classes. Or I’m learning what I can in the event that I don’t get in to that sequence.
Of note was this post, by Alex Tribou, regarding a local iPhone news application, currently in the research phase. And I thought to myself, “finally, something here that I might be interested in reading.”
…We’ve coordinated with all of our newsrooms to come up with an idea for a local news application. There will likely still be some tweaking here and there, but we have a pretty solid idea about what we want to do. We continue to try to get into contact with iPhone users, which has been challenging so far. We were not able to get a list of names like we had hoped, so it looks like we’re going to have to spread the word and see what happens. Misty is starting to post our survey so that we can get as much feedback as possible…
Continue reading ‘Oh, convergence’
February 10, 2008; 3:39 pm
Update, March 15: Post and photos regarding the March 15 demonstration.
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In other news, I’ve got a lot of pictures I need to upload and a few stories to tell. Let’s get to that now.
In January, Anonymous, a large, decentralized online community, declared war on the Church of Scientology regarding actions the church has brought upon current and former members. The war became dubbed Project Chanology, a portmanteau of “chan” (i.e., “chan” sites, such as 4chan, which harbor most of the Anonymous community) and “Scientology”.
Why should you care about this? You probably shouldn’t, but most of you know that I enjoy watching chaos unfold in the first-person.
Protests were scheduled for February 10, the birthdate of Lisa McPherson, who died in 1995 after being kept in isolation by the Church of Scientology for 17 days, also apparently taken off of important medication due to Scientology’s stance on psychiatry and medicine.
Continue reading ‘“Anonymous” protests Church of Scientology’
February 10, 2008; 12:00 am
Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic to this page, thanks to Simon Willison linking to me. (Which, in turn, promoted this post on the Django community RSS feed.)
If you were linked to this page and are interested in reading a bit more of the history of this project and a few technical notes about the new site, you should probably start here.
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We launched Friday morning, with an e-mail to our MizzouIT DNS contact to switch our themaneater.com domain over to the new site.
Of course, we just couldn’t have a flawless launch. The site was slow, the site would break (503 Service Unavailable), and it sucked.
Continue reading ‘themaneater.com Launch’
February 7, 2008; 12:53 am
Over a year and a half since I became involved with the online side of the Maneater, I finally feel that this new site project has fought its way out of the jaws of vaporwaredom. Following one false start after another and over a year of high hopes and dashed dreams, I think we have finally accomplished something.
Without further adieu, here is the current URL at which you can test the new Maneater site:
http://www.themaneater.com/
Continue reading ‘Maneater Open Beta (Lessons Part 4)’
February 3, 2008; 10:48 pm
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
This is part three.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
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I’m really going to gloss over the templates and views more than I’d like. Honestly, writing the views was more of a Python learning experience than a Django learning experience.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons, Part 3′
