Category Archives: Work

cumul.us launches

After months of design and development in my (ahem) “free time”, I’m happy to say cumul.us has launched publicly.

I’d just like to say thanks to all the people who have had to hear me talk about this incessantly, the people who got random questions and problems thrown at them, and people who helped out otherwise with testing and ideas and suggestions.

There is also a new cumul.us blog that you’ll be able to keep track of, because I’ll be trying my hardest not to muddy this space, and keep the conversation going over there. (And yes, I will be updating the design of that blog later.)

The wisdom of clouds

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time, which is called cumul.us. The (what I consider a) clever play on words revolves around two things: weather and people.

What is the idea? I could bore you with buzzwords such as aggregation, prediction markets, and the wisdom of the crowds, but the real point is to take advantage of these types of things in order to give you simple and accurate weather in a way that you can both use day to day, and also provide a way to make it a more interactive and interesting experience.

  • Firstly, the site will combine as many possible sources of weather forecasts as possible. No one source is ever right all the time, so the idea is that if you aggregate them together, you don’t need to check several sources and you get a safer, more accurate forecast. If you also track all of these sources and check their accuracy over time, you’ll be able to actually see which ones are more accurate than the others.
  • Secondly, you can predict the weather yourself. When you make prediction for a particular time and place, the site will go check all of its data sources and record what really happened, and give you a score based on how right you were. It could turn out that a random person is a better predictor of the weather than a professional meteorologist or organization. That person could even be you. Since the site will be tracking the accuracy of all of this, you’ll be able to see who is more right, and follow them.
  • Thirdly (is that even a word?) the site will give you information on the real reason you check the weather: to find out what you should wear. As people submit what they are wearing, it goes into the aggregation of what everyone is wearing in order to suggest to other people what they should wear.

Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out. For now, I’ve been keeping track of like-minded posts on del.icio.us and thrown a few screenshots up on Flickr, but the site is slated to launch at the beginning of November. If you’d like a sneak peek, just send me an e-mail, because there won’t be any lame super secret beta site with invites to pass out on Techcrunch… it will just launch and that will be it.

Translate regular text or HTML code into script language write code

Have you ever needed to take regular text or HTML code and write out in a scripting language? If so, you know it can be a pain in the ass to switch all the quotes to backslash-quotes (JS/PHP) or double-quotes (ASP). In my limited searching I couldn’t find a tool to do this quick function, so I made my own. You might find it useful.

Simply type your text or code into the first box, click the button for which language you want it translated into, and you will have code you can cut and paste.






A cartography of work

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My first job, working as a groundskeeper at a college in St. Paul.

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Later I worked at a local hardware store. Once again, there is a baseball field and college in the vicinity.

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This is in Bloomington, MN near the Mall of America. Note the recurring theme of yet another baseball field at the top of the picture.

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Here is a fancy suburban Minneapolis office park. I worked at the building on the left, then ended up working at the building on the right side of the street several years later.

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This interesting shape is at an office park near the Oakland airport in Alameda, CA. It was right near the water, which explains the weird brown stuff and water in the bottom left. Another recurring theme: a football field, which is the practice facility of the Oakland Raiders.

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Embarcadero Center on the water’s edge of downtown San Francisco.

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A warehouse space in Minneapolis on the edge of downtown. Not quite the Warehouse District, but close enough.

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I worked at the fairly nondescript building at the end of this T-intersection in Edina, MN. The weirdly shaped building is a library and government center, but is entirely less exciting architecturally than the shape suggests.

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In St. Louis Park, MN, I worked in the lower of the two buildings with the wedges on top and the white parking ramps to the left. Further to the left was a large pharmaceuticals distribution warehouse and abandoned tennis courts.

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This is as far away as I ever worked from my house. This was in Eden Prairie, MN, and across the street from yet another professional football team’s (Minnesota Vikings) practice facility.

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This was in St. Paul, MN where I worked in the fairly simple square block in the center. I actually started in the building right below it, but it was torn down and an expansion of about the same size was built and attached to the existing square building. While the newer building was being built, I worked in the tall building on the right, which is the Wells Fargo Tower. You can actually even see my parking spot to the left of my building!

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This is in Redmond, WA, as part of the largest and most well-known campus in Redmond. I work in the H-shaped building (#25 out of hundreds, none of which are more than a few stories high, probably due to some city codes put in place to not block rich people’s views) in the north central area of the picture.

Election night

Well, that was fun. After seeing some good roundups of election night graphics and a few personal tours by the designers themselves (such as Khoi Vinh of the New York Times and Nathan Borror of the Lawrence Journal-World) I thought I’d share my own rundown of what we did at Minnesota Public Radio for election night results.

First off, the big deal was the special election block on the homepage, which included a live map of the governor’s race and a balance of power for both national and state houses, both of which were updating behind the scenes without having to refresh the page.

Minnesota Public Radio election night homepage

The other big thing was the interactive results map, which allows you to see up-to-the-minute results without having to refresh, drill down to specific counties and districts, and even switch the view of the map to see the geographic strengths and weaknesses of specific parties. Notice how I didn’t have to include a screenshot of those? That’s because there’s permalinking to specific zooms and views. There’s also switching back and forth from Flash to HTML versions of the results because of that fact. Here’s a screenshot anyway:

Minnesota Public Radio election results interactive map

I personally don’t think there’s nothing terribly amazing about our basic results pages, except for the fact that I consider them to be fairly readable, digestible, don’t look like pre-packaged crap from an outside supplier, and just the fact that there are a lot of pages, which allows you to look at however general or specific you want to be.

Minnesota Public Radio election results

Another interesting part of our election results was the fact that we gave them to anyone else who wanted them, through our election results widget. Places who used it ranged from personal sites to political bloggers to small town papers to political parties themselves, and the customization ranged anywhere from not having to do much to a fantastic super-customized approach. There were even times were you could get our results faster from somewhere other than our own site, due to our traffic load. This may seem strange, but I think that’s kind of an awesome public service.

In general the night went rather smooth, even while having almost 10x the usual amount of traffic. The data retrieval from the Secretary of State slowed up a bit later in the evening due to a similar kind of media crunch on their end, but data still eked out along the way. I’d love to hear any comments or criticism on anything you see on the site or in the interactive maps, because hey, I hear this kind of thing is happening again in a few years.

Posting plans delayed by elections

Remember when I was all gung-ho about posting all the time? Well, something always gets in the way… this time it’s the general election on November 7, and I’m busy building things for work. As you might be able to tell from last election, there’s a bunch of data fetching, moving, and displaying that goes on. I’m working on improving some of these, particularly the Flash apps. There will also be something handy for you all coming out real soon.

The olden days of online news

In reading this article entitled “Newspaper.com visitors up by nearly a third, NAA says”, I didn’t realize that “newspaper.com visitors” was just a way of saying “online newspaper visitors” in a general sense, so I was quite surprised when I got to the real newspaper.com.

At the site, it is not a newspaper conglomerate such as News Corp, Gannett or Knight-Ridder, but instead some fantastic screenshots of “the world’s first international multimedia online newspaper, News In Motion“, which existed from 1993-1996 and was eventually usurped by the web. My guess is that the reason the site is still around is because the domain name is worth a pretty penny, but it’s still nice to see some insight into some older online news thinking with the splash page, ISSN number, and button navigation.

Should photos be considered printer-friendly?

Recently someone at work printed an article from our site (like this one, for example) and wondered where the images were.

If you print it (or save some trees and just look at a print preview to see what you would get), you will notice that the presentation is largely different from what you get on the web. It is using print styles in the CSS to hide various things, such as the navigation, sidebars, and photos. It also displays a different, more minimal footer. What this printer-ized version tells you is where it came from, how to contact them, and the text of the story.

One argument for not displaying the photos is based on why people print out web pages: simple reading, reference, filing, or forwarding. Another argument is printer ink: The majority of people who tested this site mentioned that the reason they choose “printer-friendly” or text-only versions of a page was so that the images would not print. Why? The cost of printer ink. Printer ink costs more per drop than vintage Dom Perignon, so that’s quite understandable.

One stated argument for printing the photos is that, since this is a news story, they are also “telling the story” and thus should be preserved.

I really don’t know that there is one true answer to this, but I’m interested in your opinion on the matter, or perhaps some more arguments for and against printing photos from a web page. What do you think?