Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

This summer I spent my time helping on a bunch of stuff, both standalone small stuff and stuff on top of existing stuff. If words like “stuff” pique your interest, here’s more of it:

• Launched the Denver Post’s article commenting and community site. It’s called Neighbors, and it holds a heckuva lot of stuff. I built it on top of the phpBB forum software. We’re publishing city- and town-specific news / community information (Denver Neighbors and Boulder Neighbors are two of the locations). It runs the article comments on the main Denver Post site. It also has a rudimentary community photo gallery, which we’re using to get people to post photos on stuff like their cute kids or their Broncos fan photos. People can write comments, rate comments, write in their own blogs (few do, predictably), and I’m working on giving members a better measure of their participation. We reached 10,000 members in our first four months, which may be fast or may be slow, who knows. What’s most interesting to me is how the tools and functionality in Neighbors are getting used by other parts of our site, and I’ll write more about that in a future post. What’s second or third most-interesting to me is the “full name” decision: A month ago we started requiring both first and last name of new members. (And if you’re still interested about this stuff, and want all the nitty-gritty details of how Neighbors has evolved, you can get that info here)
• Helped launch the Post’s prep sports site. It’s not fancy and it’s not pretty, and we’re still getting the hang of it, but it was done in a ridiculously small amount of time. I helped with some of the CSS, HTML, and site integration.
• Helped here and there with the Post’s new online community for parents in Colorado, Mile High Mamas. Most of this was building on the Neighbors forums to make them work for Mile High Mamas. This wasn’t easy, but the solution turned out to be something real simple. We pointed talk.milehighmamas.com at the Neighbors forums, and I added a little bit of logic to Neighbors to address it. Check it out: If you go to talk.milehighmamas.com/forums.php?c=18 it’s the same page, but different look, as neighbors.denverpost.com/forums.php?c=18 .
• Helped build out the Post’s web feeds. Up until this summer, Newsgator’s feed-reader app as the main entry point to the Post’s web feeds. It was hard or impossible to find our feeds otherwise. Me and a longtime co-worker / freelancer, Dan, added all our feeds to FeedBurner, put them in the meta-data of the homepage and the major section fronts, and we’re still working out the kinks on our Web Feeds page.