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Washington Post Recipe Guide

One of my first major projects on The Post's tools team was to create a recipes database. This was a project the site and the paper had wanted for a long time, but it never materialized for a variety of reasons, including a disagreement over upkeep and back-filling (one side wanted a complete workflow change, and the other wanted someone else to re-input all the recipes). Eventually, those details were sorted out and the project was green-lighted.

Up to this point, print and web had separate systems for everything from election results to voters and community guides. This was one of our first joint publishing efforts: a system that allowed print and web editors and aides enter and edit recipes and publish them online and in the paper.

As the developer, I was responsible for a lot of the project management: setting interim deadlines, running testing, taking ideas back and forth between both groups and making recommendations about solutions.

It's a pretty straightforward Django app, one of my first. The search engine is probably the most complicated code in the app. I really developed a practical understanding of the DRY-concept with the methods used in presenting recipes internally (Internal preview and CCI export). While much of this app is not that advanced, as one of my first Django projects, it was very much a learning experience, and helped me understand "the right way" of doing things.

I think the admin might be more complex than the code; the editors at the Food section wanted an easy way of changing the recipes based on the number of servings (easily be able to calculate quantities for the user for any multiple or fraction of the recipe). They also wanted to be able to generate a grocery list with the items grouped by section of the grocery story. The admin can handle the data for all of this, but that functionality hasn't been completed. (This launched in mid-2005 in conjunction with the redesign of the print food section. I was pulled onto other projects almost immediately after, and left the group shortly after that, so wasn't able to complete it.)

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Virginia Tech Shootings

A breaking news tool example is The Post's victim profiles from the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. The Metro staff created victim profile pages, adding to them as more information became available. Later in the day, we decided to create memorial pages for each of the victims to allow users to submit comments and condolences. To ensure they were respectful and appropriate, they needed to be moderated. The local staff was planning on recreating these pages in our content management system, which had a commenting system in place. (For some reason, these pages were initially built outside the CMS). The Interactivity editor suggested we build them as a blog, which would give us the moderation missing in CMS comments.

Clearly, the best place for the memorials was the current profile pages that already had lots of links and traffic instead of something new. If we rebuilt these pages at all, we wouldn't be able to effectively get users to them. I suggested a combination of the blog and the existing pages. I created a new blog to handle the comments, and used very basic javascript to embed the comment form and a few of the most recent comments on the static memorial pages.

By the end of the day, we had an approach to memorial pages that gave us the ease of creation and administration that we needed, and that gave our readers an intuitive way to grieve, remember and try to understand.

In addition to building out these pages, and training the producers and editors who would be maintaining it, I helped moderate comments and edit some of the copy.