Monthly Archives: April 2010

Findability and Exploration: the future of search

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 29, 2010
When readers are exploring and searching, we see them at a crucial point in time: a moment when they're ready, willing and eager to learn. The power to turn exploration into learning is the most wonderful gift we can give to our readers. Let us help readers on their quest for knowledge by retooling navigation and search.
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The Basic Unit of Information

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 27, 2010
A meandering little post about (1) three different types of structured information, (2) the "basic unit of information" meme that wants to put the filing cabinet and brains of every journalist on the web and (3) how information architecture for news websites doesn't just pose design and technical challenges, but requires us to think about the fundamentals of the journalistic enterprise and its future.
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We’re in the information business

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 22, 2010
A well-architected website stores news as a bunch of units of information. Structured information is a prequisite to the new and exciting things every newspaper wants to do online but currently can't. Structure leads to adaptability, allowing us to change course whenever we please or whenever technological breakthroughs force our hand. Going beyond big blobs of text is about freeing us from the chains of legacy costs, and using that freedom to experiment with the future of news.
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Navigation headaches

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 14, 2010
We're better off building our primary navigation algorithmically, using the basic elements of a story — its theme, its genre, its medium, the locations it talks about — as our building blocks. Once we're there, these building blocks can help us make kick-ass secondary navigation as well, giving readers alternative ways of browsing all you have to offer.
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Ik stop ermee

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 13, 2010
Ik stop met Apache.
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There’s nothing wrong with apps

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 11, 2010
I’ve been seeing some random chatter lately about the trouble with reusable apps in Django, succinctly epitomized by this remark from Luís Pedro Coelho: “the app system is not the right system to break up functionality”. I don’t get that. Surely, there are a lot of Django apps on GitHub that are plain crap. Handling [...]
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Themes and topics

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 9, 2010
Wednesday I suggested that we could solve a lot of problems with tagging if we start thinking in terms of relationships to real things instead of seeing tags als mere labels. With tags as true entities it’s easy to figure out what to tag (you tag persons, organizations, locations, events) and how to tag it. [...]
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Tags don’t cut it

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 7, 2010
If we re-imagine tags as rich connections that relate content to the persons, organizations, locations, events and themes they talk about, hopefully magic will happen.
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Information architecture for news websites

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 6, 2010
April will see me blogging about a small but important piece of the puzzle that is the future of news: the information architecture behind a good news website. Each of the four-and-a-half parts will look at the current state of things, criticize what's wrong with our websites and what should change, but also provide a first stab at a solution.
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An identity team for Python

By Stijn Debrouwere | Published: April 4, 2010
Thinking out loud. A while ago I asked a question on StackOverflow that has been keeping my mind occupied since: “What should people new to Python know about its community and ecosystem?”. I observed: With How to Think Like a Computer Scientist and other great tutorials, it’s easy to get familiar with the language, but [...]
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