Author archive: Chris.

Posted by Chris on November 06, 2008 at 09:21 AM

Turning Indiana Blue

StarFiles: Obama in Indiana - More IndyStar Galleries View this gallery at IndyStar: StarFiles: Obama in Indiana I woke up...

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Posted by Chris on August 15, 2008 at 08:01 AM

Start spreading the news (photos)

Downtown rescue - More IndyStar Galleries View this gallery at IndyStar: Downtown rescue Obviously, photos and gallery management systems have...

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Posted by Chris on July 09, 2008 at 12:59 PM

Aggregation: To Link or Summarize

So, as I mentioned in the last post, we’re working on a massive content aggregation project right now, with the...

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Posted by Chris on July 04, 2008 at 10:15 AM

Not hyperlocal ... Hyper-Me

So, the Wall Street Journal finally came out and declared LoudounExtra.com to be a “flop” … and I say, let...

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Posted by Chris on May 19, 2008 at 03:27 PM

Finding somebody's Google Reader shared page

So, after attending the Interactive Media Conference last week (and picking up an Eppy for Indy.com, natch), I found myself...

Comments: 3 (view/add your own) | Tags: Recommended, examples, google
Posted by Chris on May 15, 2008 at 11:59 AM

A clarification

My last post might have been a little too bombastic, so allow me to backtrack a bit and get to...

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Posted by Chris on May 09, 2008 at 01:58 PM

F--- video*

Newspapers everywhere are falling all over themselves to do web videos. It’s a goddamn waste of time and counter-productive to...

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Posted by Chris on November 28, 2007 at 04:39 PM

Come work with me

We have an opening right now in the Innovation & Development department of The Indianapolis Star for a web designer....

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Posted by Chris on July 27, 2007 at 10:54 PM

Volume is the future

I switched from print design to online development a year and a half ago because I was frustrated with the...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: Newspapers, Recommended, Work, metadata
Posted by Chris on April 30, 2007 at 06:52 AM

Introducing IndyPaws

From the people what brung you IndyMoms.com, comes IndyPaws.com: Central Indiana’s one-stop shop for all your pets’ social networking needs.I...

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Posted by Chris on April 11, 2007 at 08:58 AM

endless_pageless: An unobtrusive pageless pagination in Rails plugin

NOTE: Whoa, that’s an old entry here folks. Give me a little bit to get it squared back away (like...

Comments: 2 (view/add your own) | Tags: Recommended, Work, examples, javascript, plugins, rails
Posted by Chris on March 23, 2007 at 06:07 AM

Widgetize your world

I had this idea with the first photo system I built, but today I managed to make it a reality...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: Blogs, Newspapers, Recommended, TheOffice, Work, examples, photos
Posted by Chris on March 19, 2007 at 08:56 AM

Unobtrusive Pageless Pagination in Rails

Inspired a lot by a keen dislike of pagination and more than a little by Unspace’s starting point, I started...

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Posted by Chris on March 12, 2007 at 10:00 PM

The trunk for the branches

It might have something to do with my current project at work, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about...

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Posted by Chris on March 01, 2007 at 11:02 PM

The path of least resistance

When building ”Steve,” one of the ways I wanted to stretch the photo gallery concept I’ve been fiddling with and...

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Posted by Chris on February 28, 2007 at 09:58 AM

Metadata magic act

For my first trick, I’m going to make all that metadata I talked about yesterday disappear. And I have a...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: Work, metadata, photos, plugins, rails
Posted by Chris on February 27, 2007 at 12:18 PM

Search the metadata, not the photo

In newsrooms across the country, we’ve already figured out how to quickly search and manage copious amounts of photos. Photo...

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Posted by Chris on February 26, 2007 at 08:02 PM

Media Temple, Rails and Mint

Still haven't touched IE ... but at least I have Mint working properly. After running into this problem here at...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: Thissite, mediatemple, mint, rails
Posted by Chris on February 25, 2007 at 10:48 PM

A new home

Nobody should be able to find this yet, but dummied.org, the temporary/permanent home of the artist formerly known as dummied.net...

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Posted by Chris on November 06, 2006 at 09:54 PM

Going Indy

I'm sitting in a cheap hotel off Interstate 70 inside the 465 beltway surrounding Indianapolis, IN, with a stack of...

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Posted by Chris on September 22, 2006 at 10:56 PM

Database Journalism in the darkroom

Database journalism, it's a big word (or two actually) and all the rage these days. Everybody's abuzz about storing stories...

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Posted by Chris on June 27, 2006 at 08:30 PM

Zenphoto goes (relatively) big time

I reviewed a release of Zenphoto a while back, and I never really forgot about this little gem of a...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: CSS, Recommended, Work, XHTML, javascript, mysql, php
Posted by Chris on June 17, 2006 at 07:56 PM

A tree grows in the forest

An odd thing about the U.S. Open site I've built (Lohud.com/open) is that I can't really get any sense of...

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Posted by Chris on June 16, 2006 at 07:53 PM

Settling into a groove

While the golfers continue to hack their way through beautiful Winged Foot Golf Club (I'll upload photos from a practice...

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Posted by Chris on June 15, 2006 at 02:10 PM

Open-ing wider

After a near-constant blur of work over the past few months, the U.S. Open is here and our not-100-percent-ready-for-primetime website...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: CSS, MovableType, Newspapers, Recommended, Sports, Work, XHTML, rss
Posted by Chris on May 12, 2006 at 10:43 AM

The Open's opening

I've been at the new job for nearly a month now and it's been pretty much everything I expected it...

Comments: 0 (view/add your own) | Tags: CSS, Newspapers, Recommended, Sports, TheOpen, Work, XHTML
Posted by Chris on April 07, 2006 at 03:27 PM

Fork in the road

I guess I'll need to update the bio ... and probably this whole website was well. After a month-plus worth...

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Posted by Chris on March 14, 2006 at 12:32 PM

The importance of why

After spending some of last week interviewing for a management position in my current employer's internet department, I've been giving...

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Posted by Chris on March 02, 2006 at 07:18 PM

You already are a blog ...

And it's time to start acting like one. I've mentioned this offhandedly before, this idea that newspaper websites are already...

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Posted by Chris on February 17, 2006 at 05:45 PM

Simplifying print URLs

Let's say you produce a print product (be it newspaper, magazine, zine or newsletter) and a web product. Sometimes in...

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Posted by Chris on February 10, 2006 at 03:52 PM

Something for the portfolio

After several months of Photoshopping, coding, copy editing and prodding, the website for my sister's upcoming wedding is now live....

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Posted by Chris on January 30, 2006 at 08:39 PM

Newspapers and the search game

Jason Kottke's ad-hoc research on the search-engine ranking of New York Times articles doesn't really surprise me. Newspaper websites, as...

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Posted by Chris on January 29, 2006 at 10:31 PM

Why I stick with MT

As much as Movable Type sometimes aggravates me (usually just when I have to wade in hip-deep in a thicket...

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Posted by Chris on January 29, 2006 at 05:16 PM

Set it and forget it

One of the fun things about setting up my sister's website is using her site as an excuse to hack...

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Posted by Chris on January 20, 2006 at 08:15 PM

Zenphoto 1.0.1 (beta)

I have been steadily working on a wedding website for my sister's upcoming nuptials. It's mostly finished (but not ready...

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Posted by Chris on January 13, 2006 at 05:02 PM

Odds and ends

I'm knee deep in CSS, XHTML and one of my first forays into the dark, mysterious world of javascript and...

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Posted by Chris on January 07, 2006 at 03:36 PM

Paring Down

I've been in a bit of a motivation rut lately, despite spending an ungodly amount of time parked in front...

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Posted by Chris on January 04, 2006 at 04:51 AM

12 dead

"Miracles happen in West Virginia and today we got one."— Charlotte Weaver, wife of Jack Weaver, one of the men...

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Posted by Chris on December 30, 2005 at 03:19 PM

A Round of Applause for The Times

In the time I've been working as a newspaper page designer, I have increasing grown resentful of the New York...

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Posted by Chris on December 16, 2005 at 09:17 PM

Sticking my neck out

My current newspaper employer—who I have not explictly mentioned here but haven't made a real effort at hiding, either—has recently...

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Posted by Chris on November 22, 2005 at 05:15 PM

Making Movable Type fluid

Movable Type, the publishing engine that (used to run) this site, comes complete with a fixed-width layout (much like the...

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Posted by Chris on November 18, 2005 at 04:55 PM

What I'm talking about

I wasn't planning on going back to the bad newspaper web design well quite so soon, but I stumbled upon...

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Posted by Chris on November 15, 2005 at 03:38 PM

Full-frontal content

I've noticed that over the past few personal websites I've done, there's been one common theme (aside from black text...

Comments: 1 (view/add your own) | Tags: Blogs, Newspapers
Posted by Chris on November 11, 2005 at 04:09 PM

Getting it right

So, I've talked a lot so far about what newspaper companies do wrong when they stumble toward the digital age....

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Posted by Chris on November 07, 2005 at 04:08 PM

The Technical Details

I'd like to think that most people who design websites professionally or even semi-professionally would already know about web standards...

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Posted by Chris on November 02, 2005 at 01:36 AM

The Big Picture

As I've mentioned on my bio page, my night job is with a daily newspaper. I design newspaper pages for...

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Posted by Chris on October 30, 2005 at 09:59 PM

Finishing the CSS Reboot

After a month-long dash to the finish line, this new site design and structure was finished just in time for...

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Posted by Chris on September 14, 2005 at 04:58 PM

MT-Planner, the answer to my prayers?

After yesterday's entry, I spent a lot of time thinking of ways to stick with Movable Type and somehow pull...

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Posted by Chris on September 12, 2005 at 04:59 PM

The limits of MT

The more I work with Movable Type, the more I am becoming frustrated with certain parts of it. It's a...

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Posted by Chris on September 10, 2005 at 01:22 AM

Work in progress

There are times that my interest in the web wanes a bit, namely when it's special section time at my...

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Posted by Chris on September 02, 2005 at 04:34 PM

Making a guest appearance

In between hours of Hurricane Katrina watching, entertaining Pam's parents and a day trip to Hyde Park, N.Y., to tour...

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Posted by Chris on August 31, 2005 at 06:53 PM

Commented simple template

Okay. I managed to sneak away from my wife's family long enough to comment up a file of the simplified...

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Posted by Chris on August 30, 2005 at 02:42 PM

About those templates

After a night's sleep, I thought I would give a few notes and pointers about the templates I created and...

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Posted by Chris on August 29, 2005 at 05:00 PM

Simpler Movable Type templates

So, as Pam and I still slog away at laying the groundwork for our business idea, I've been signed up...

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