Tune In
I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with lifelong friend and all-around great guy Michael Suhr on developing a platform and news/content delivery strategy for his family broadcasting company. M&H Broadcasting serves south central and south east Iowa markets in Knoxville, Pella and Washington. The work has been some of the most collaborative I’ve ever done. Our friendly relationship and Mike’s desire to keep on top of what we doing technically meant the process needed to be open and iterative. Fortunately for both of us, we weren’t pressured by artificial dates and milestones, not typical but definitely successful in this case.
What we put together was a news-delivery platform built on WordPress, using off-the-shelf tools and plugins and a lot creative customizations. Our initial investment in ‘getting it right’ for the Knoxville/Pella station has already paid dividends as we work to roll out the Washington station site in the coming weeks. The goal was a design reminiscent of the old site but flexible and adaptive enough to grow with the content and news needs of users going forward. Another big requirement was that staff could feel empowered to make changes and own the content, which to-date has been quite successful. WordPress provide great tools for content creators to author, edit and manage their work.
M&H has a team of reporters gathering local news for on-air broadcast but they also capture audio and video for on-web publishing. This reporting is essential in smaller, more rural markets that typically have weekly or semi-daily papers and fall under the radar of local television broadcast news. The reporting M&H are doing is consistently half a day or more ahead of local television, and their devoted web readers show that they are the primary news-source for these areas. needless to say it’s thrill to be part of something that people use and rely on, particularly for the community I grew up in.
Here are some highlights:
• Used a selection of Fugue icons with some of my own thrown in as well
• A fair bit of jquery behind the scenes and a few UI touches
• Yahoo! Pipes to created aggregated and multi-tag/multi-category RSS feeds
• PHP5 DOM screen scraping (for weather content)
• Post expiration for breaking news/weather and cancellations
• Custom Admin Branding
• Picasa photo management and integration using Shashin
• Highly customized printing plugin for hard copies (important to a lot of readers who still print and share with friends with family)
• SuperCaching – too many queries on the homepage/sidebar to live without this
• Highly intelligent ad-serving framework built on Google Ad Manager
• Lots and lots of htaccess magic for feeds, past pages and to prevent deadlinks
We’ve also installed and had a lot of fun and success with the Analytics 360º tool from Crowd Favorite. Nice for contributors to see stats without needing to open the gates on the full analytics tool.
Checkout KNIA/KRLS at www.kniakrls.com to see it in action.
WordPress HelpCenter
Crowd Favorite was pleased to announce WordPress HelpCenter earlier this week. WordPress HelpCenter fills a support role for WordPress users looking for help with their WP issues. You can see the details on the site or Alex’s article. Looks like this be a successful endeavor and most certainly be accepted and used by the community. I’m proud to have been a small part in getting this out the door and look forward to seeing where it goes.
Augmented Reality Overview
Using the FLARtoolkit for marker detection, Ogilvy folks talk about a pretty killer interactive site for GE.
BumperTunes
One of the fine sponsors of WordCamp Denver is podcast music bumper site BumperTunes. I have no idea who is behind the site, but it’s a great idea and the quality of music is top notch. I’ve been toying with some podcast/vlog ideas and this is exactly the sort of asset I need to be able to easily buy, have it be original and have it be good. This seems to satisfy all those criteria.
New Site Lives
It’s a work in progress, as always, but the newest iteration of this site is up and I’m quite pleased. I’ve been tinkering for the past 2-3 months with this concept and design. I’m still working the bugs out a bit, IE6 you’re last on the list, but if you see anything substantially broken feel free to comment. Also if you or someone you know is copywriter and would like a little coffee money to wordsmith the grammatical nightmare you see here drop me a note. I’ll be recapping some of the fun stuff I’m using as we move forward, I have quite a few features yet to be turned on, but hopefully I’ll get them working soon.
JabberWerx AJAX Announced
Alex has posted an overview and announcement on about JabberWerx AJAX, a new set libraries for sites to build and integrate Jabber functionality. I was fortunate to be part of Crowd Favorite’s effort on this project and look forward to seeing it used in the wild.
Alex has a few more screenshots on his flickr page.
Des Moines Web Geeks Next Meeting – August 25
The next Des Moines Web Geeks meeting will be Monday, August 25th at Impromptu Studio. Hope to see you all there!
Des Moines Web Geeks
It looks like we’re going to have a nice, full audience on Thursday night for the inaugural Des Moines Web Geeks meet-up. My hope in forming and organizing this ongoing event is to mimic some of the refresh and web standards meetings held in other cities. If you haven’t seen it or signed up please do so soon so we can have a good idea of whose planning to attend. There will be a few door prizes (one that’s pretty darn cool and one-of-a-kind) and soda and snacks.
Web Geekup
I’d like to pull the discussion of the possibility of Des Moines area web geekup together here. Interested in ideas for places, times, etc. and the kind of stuff people would be interested in.
The basic idea is this:
• Meeting of primarily web folks working in web development, design and management
• Sharing ideas on methods, ideas, technologies, etc.
• Venue should encourage interaction and sharing (connection if we think it’s needed, power, drinks, light, etc.)
• Open to anyone, think of it as a learning exchange
• No formal agenda but if we want to have ‘topics’ that would be great so people can pick and choose when they want to come
Anything else people want to add is wide open. I have no ownership outside of wanting to make this a reality. I realized at the last tweetup there’s a strong community of people who know their craft and just want to geek out/hack with them. Help my dream come true won’t you?
Elevator Up Offices
Zeeland, Michigan’s elevator up is a hosting and development shop with some pretty sweet new office digs.
Previously