Six months at the Statesman… and counting

Yesterday marked six months since I started my job at the Idaho Statesman and I must say the time has flown by. I have probably learned more about the news business than I have about Web development, but I fully expected that to be the case early on. That’s not to say I didn’t learn some new Web tricks though. I’ve mastered many of the ins and outs of the McClatchy Interactive publishing system that runs our main site and I’ve also picked up the basics of Drupal development for our new Voices community site. In addition, I have scratched the surface of jQuery and dabbled a bit in the Zend Framework for PHP. My Linux and MySQL skills are being used every day, but I don’t think I’ve really learned anything new in those areas.

I want to thank the Academy

I’d like to share a list of accomplishments for the first six months. Please bear in mind that most items on this list were a group effort not just within our online team, but also involving the staff at McClatchy Interactive, our resilient vendors, and often my counterparts at other McClatchy papers like Anchorage and Fresno. Don’t worry. I’ll spare you the “shoulders of giants” speech. Here is the list:

There were many other smaller projects that I worked on, but these are definitely the highlights. Story commenting has probably been the most interesting for all of us. We launched the feature about six weeks ago and we have roughly 6,500 comments on 1,000 stories by 1,400 different people! This is far more than anybody expected and the pace is still increasing each week. It is not without its challenges, though. I have created a rudimentary profanity filter using regular expressions, we are employing Drupal’s spam module, and a healthy dose of human moderation is also in the mix to catch the innuendos that computers can’t identify. For the most part people have behaved, but the conversation does get heated quite often and many of our reporters have had to become a little more thick-skinned. Overall, though, it’s been a huge success.

And now the music is playing

I should wrap this up. I will probably make these updates more frequent – every three months seems reasonable. We have quite a lot on the horizon including a new search plugin, user submitted photos and video, and several custom mini-sites that I’m not at liberty to discuss until they launch. I would hate to tip off the competition. ;) So look for another round-up of Web news in January if not before.

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October 17, 2007 | Filed Under Web development 

Comments

6 Responses to “Six months at the Statesman… and counting”

  1. Ben Leivian on October 17th, 2007 9:42 am

    Congratulations Patrick. How long has it been since the move from Arizona?

  2. Patrick on October 17th, 2007 11:40 am

    Thanks, Ben. We left Arizona in July of 2005, so it’s been 27 months and counting for that.

  3. Wes Maldonado on October 17th, 2007 3:13 pm

    The Seattle PHP Meetup group misses you, glad to hear you’re doing well!

  4. Patrick on October 17th, 2007 10:23 pm

    Hi Wes,
    I miss the Seattle PHP Meetup too. It’s a shame I only got to attend one time. I’ll stay on the roster just in case a trip to Seattle coincides with a meetup.

    In the meantime, I’ve been serving as an assistant coordinator of the Boise Web Technologies Meetup. We’re not quite as big as Seattle, so we can broaden the scope without infringing on existing groups. We started as a PHP Meetup, but that wasn’t very viable in this area so we adapted. Three meetings so far and it’s going pretty well.

  5. One year at the Statesman : Alimadzi - by Patrick Lee on April 21st, 2008 9:10 pm

    [...] one year since I started working at the Statesman.  It seems like just yesterday that I was observing six months.  Time flies when you’re juggling a dozen projects and multiple deadlines.  I can’t [...]

  6. Don on March 6th, 2009 1:37 pm

    Guess you couldn’t tip us off since this is my first visit to your blog… but they’re worse off since you left!