Every news organization that I've talked to that's used Ellington loves it. If they want to seriously make a change for the better in an industry dominated by antiquated CMSs that users hate, they need to open-source it. Hopefully they make the right choice here.
Fun idea, but your auth is quite broken right now. I keep losing my work; very frustrating. Also, already lost my work on one challenge from clicking the I/O button.
I like the cool 80s nostalgia, but it's not super-usable.
I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.
On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.
You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.
I have a friend who recently quit because of the crazy hours they were working him and the menial work he had to do. He told me he wasn't the only one quitting, lots of other people had been hired for similar positions and got frustrated and left.
This NYTimes piece on the company reads like an ad more than anything else. Pretty upsetting.
Interesting. Should start fairly slow... The idea is to catch notes that are in key (black ones) while avoiding those that are out of key (red ones). I'll try to slow down the blocks a bit to make it easier.
It probably wasn't, but we needed some way to save high scores, and "outsourcing" auth to FB was the simplest way. I've done other projects where that's optional, and that'll probably be the end goal for this as well.
If it's any consolation, I don't like sites that only use FB auth either... this is just a product of the time-constraint.
I did most of the JS and my friend did most of the backend. We were sorta on deadline, so the design isn't quite what I would call perfect (ha) and my JS is super-messy in places. Also, there are bits where I inexplicably use jQuery for stuff I had been doing without a framework and other weird inconsistencies like that, but hey, it works. Anyway, let me know what you think! Thanks.
Speaking as a photojournalist-turned-engineer, I think the idea of hacking photography is what got me into hacking software in the first place. I started collecting old cameras and fixing/modding them, making them do different things depending on what I liked, as opposed to what they were designed to do. Admittedly, being a gearhead doesn't help in the slightest, but playing around with cameras does lead to some interesting photography. Of course, all that hinges on having a somewhat relevant subject matter.
I had it explained to me once by one of my photoj professors that the photo consists of a message you're trying to convey about a subject. That can be done through technical proficiency or some strange artistic effects, so long as they all point towards the same message. Anything outside of that is just noise. Either technique for technique's sake or artistic effects for the effects' sake.
