Joe Think: Online news, from the trenches

In day-job land, The Denver Post launched the Colorado Guide Friday. I put it together with Django, the design skills of Michelle Whitman, and lots of help from the newsroom. It’s a site that has a bunch of lists — lists of the best indian restaurants, best indie movie theaters, best places to go on road trips to the mountains. We built it with the impending storm of Denver noobs coming in August for the Democratic National Convention. Each list is usually a list of businesses, each business is mapped out and most businesses include the hours of operation. There’s a healthy amount of detail here.

This is what I like best about the site:

• The site hooks into the Denver Post’s article-commenting member system. That’s the good thing — you don’t have to create YAUN (Yet Another User Name) if you want to participate. The bad thing is so far there aren’t a whole lot of things for folk to do on the site. Beside “reading,” there two actions: commenting on lists and declaring yourself a “fan” of a business (thanks to Lucas Grindley for that idea).
• I like the most-popular app. It’s still in its infancy, but it represents a good chunk of the custom development work I did on the site.
• I like the most-popular app. It’s still in its infancy (as in, it’s just a list of the most-popular lists from the past six hours on the sidebar), but it represents a good chunk of the development work I did on the site.

And, for those of you interested, these are the snippets, apps, and other tools I used on the Colorado Guide. One of the great parts of Django is how easy it is to build on and use other Django-people’s work.

• CoordinatesField, by Jannis Leidel
• Comment-Utils, by James Bennett
• Minidetector, by Metamoof
• db-dump, by limoudou
• Generic Admin, by Weston Nielson
• GeoPy, by Brian Beck
• Django Rating, by Gonzalo Saavedra