If you happened to be at the recent Online News Association conference in Boston and happened to attend the session on covering the 2012 elections, then a good bit of this will be repetitive. Since there wasn’t a ton of time to expand on what I said, and I don’t want to leave the impression [...]
Assuming you regularly work with data found online – and if you don’t, you’re probably here by mistake, so welcome! – then you realize what a pain it can be to grab structured files from some site, save them and import them. I have more methods in more apps than I can count that download [...]
When Heroku announced Python support this past week, I was interested in seeing how the deployment process worked compared to how Heroku handles Ruby apps. Then a post highlighted by the Python Weekly newsletter caught my eye. Swizec Teller’s entry, “Measuring vocabulary richness with Python“, described an algorithm by George Udny Yule in a 1944 [...]
My first job in Web development was as a member of washingtonpost.com’s “Tools Team.” I was, in title if not in practice, a Tool. Done snickering? Let’s move on. The Tools Team built mostly internal applications and services that helped the Web site run better. I mainly got to work on front-facing projects like the [...]
There was an interesting discussion on the NICAR-L listserv today about teaching database skills. More specifically, which software to teach and how to teach it. Should you go with SQLite, as I do? What about MS Access (the consensus seemed to lean against)? Is it too much to ask students to install database server software [...]
