The Nerd Blog
Showing You the Money (Faster)
We pitched in on some new features in the New York Times' Campaign Finance API and its Ruby wrapper, CampaignCash.
Anatomy of a Stepper Graphic
A small library for stepper graphics.
SOPA Opera Update: Opposition Surges
SOPA Blackout Day led to a surge in opposition among members of Congress.
SOPA Opera: Which Legislators Support SOPA and PIPA?
In the next few weeks, among the most talked-about legislation will be the Stop Online Piracy Act — commonly referred to as SOPA — which, if passed, would give the Attorney General the authority to block access to foreign websites deemed to be dedicated to copyright infringement.
Announcing the ProPublica News Apps Fellowship
The ProPublica News Apps desk is looking for a smart, technically-savvy journalist to join our team for a pilot project we’re calling a News Applications Fellowship.
Adaptive Design, Fixed Widths and Tablets
If you're trying to make your fixed-width site adaptive, there are some things you need to know about the viewport tag.
How We Made ProPublica.org Look Better on Your Smartphone
In order to make our site more welcoming for the increasing number of you who read us on your smartphones, we've redesigned and re-engineered the site so that people on small screens will automatically see a version of the site optimized to fit them.
Introducing DocDiver
Today we’re launching a new feature that lets readers work alongside ProPublica reporters—and each other—to identify key bits of information in documents, and to share what they’ve found. We call it DocDiver.
Facebook for News Apps: How We Harnessed the Social Network for ‘The Opportunity Gap’
Embracing 'behavior design'—coupled with our preference for keeping our apps light on database writes—spurred us to integrate Facebook for our news app in a deeper way than we’ve done before.
TimelineSetter: Easy Timelines From Spreadsheets, Now Open to All
Last week we announced TimelineSetter, our new tool for creating beautiful interactive HTML timelines. Today, after a short private beta with some of our fellow news application developers, we’re opening the code to everyone.
TimelineSetter: A New Way to Display Timelines on the Web
As far as we know, there are no good open source frameworks that web developers can use to generate timelines quickly without losing design flexibility. So we made our own.
Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data
A series of programming and technical guides on how we collected data for Dollars for Docs.
The Coder's Cause in "Dollars for Docs"
Public records, as a programming challenge, in our Dollars for Docs project.
Chapter 3: Turning PDFs to Text
Dollars for Docs Data Guide: A tutorial on several methods to convert PDFs to spreadsheets.
Chapter 2: Reading Data from Flash Sites
How to read data from Flash-based websites, part of our data-scraping guide for Dollars for Docs.
Chapter 1. Using Google Refine to Clean Messy Data
How to use the Google Refine application to make sense of imperfectly recorded data.
Chapter 4: Scraping Data from HTML
Dollars for Docs Data Guide: A tutorial on scraping HTML from websites.
