Entries by Matt with tag 'Media'

Be cool. Drive a car.

Submitted by Matt on Fri, 11/20/2009 - 12:15
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Recently, I've been thinking about how cars are portrayed versus other forms of transportation in movies, TV shows, even commercials. In fact, what really prompted this was the following Audi commercial, which was picked up by a number of transportation and urban planning blogs. Observe.

Drupal solutions for news sites: Creation date vs. publish date

Submitted by Matt on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 14:16
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This is part 3 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 3: "This article says it was published way earlier than it was actually published."

This is a seemingly small problem, and a quick fix. But it's subtle, and a good illustration and how sometimes the programmers and journalists have different ways of thinking about the content.

Drupal solutions for news sites: Rich text in node titles

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 11:43
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This is part 2 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 2: "Hey, I'm writing a book review. How do I make the book title italic in the story headline?"

Many are the times when I've wished we could get over our need to italicize titles of books, films and publications. Sadly, I don't make the rules of typography. Inevitably your editorial people will need to include bold or italic text (or even hyperlinks) in the headline (or the node title, as we developers would call it).

Drupal solutions for news sites: Multiple authors for nodes

Submitted by Matt on Fri, 06/05/2009 - 11:04
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As you might imagine, a significant part of my job at the Observer has involved creating sites that make publishing news online easier. I am, and always have been, a staunch believer in the fact that Drupal is one of the best web frameworks for news and publishing. The plethora of news organizations that use it now or are planning to use it soon bears me out on this one. That being said, Drupal's base functionality does fall short in several instances for a lot of common things that news requires. So, I'm going to describe common solutions that I've come to know in the course of customizing Drupal for several different news sites.

A morality tale about taking open source for granted

Submitted by Matt on Wed, 03/18/2009 - 22:32
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A few weeks ago, I went on a couple of job interviews. Sadly, all the firms I interviewed with ultimately turned out to be what I consider bad citizens of the Drupal community, and of the open source development community in general. That is to say, although they were using Drupal and other open source tools and often running quite profitable businesses as a result, they seemed to have zero interest in contributing back parts of their work or even interacting with other community members to help with documentation, logistics, etc.

Media wasteland

Submitted by Matt on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 00:30
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Much ado has been made in the last few years about how print media is dying. It is pretty obvious why this is case. Practically everyone my age -- and a good amount of people older than I am -- want to get their news, analysis, gossip and so forth online. I'm probably the only one of my peers who gets home delivery of the print edition of the New York Times, and I will be the first admit that it's more about the chic than because that's how I legitimately prefer to read it. So let's assume that everyone will be phasing out print over the next decade or so. What then?

Strange times to be a Jew

Submitted by Matt on Sun, 09/21/2008 - 18:51
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I just finished reading Michael Chabon's excellent The Yiddish Policeman's Union (for which there are total spoilers below the fold, by the way). A very interesting read, having just visited Israel recently. For those who are not familiar, the novel deals with an alternate timeline in which the United States offered a large tract of land in Alaska as a safe haven for European Jews fleeing the Holocaust (a plan that was proposed in real life, but killed in committee in the Senate. In the book, the main detractor of the plan is killed in a car accident). Incidentally, or perhaps because there were not enough refugees to populate the then-fledging State of Israel, the independence war of 1948 is lost to the Arabs (in real life, it was won) and Israel collapses. Only a few die-hards remain in Jerusalem, which is otherwise entirely under Arab control.

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