JFF.com
Hosting
Written by Pierce Presley Tuesday, February 02 2010 06:13
Journalism Fast Forward is hosted by A2 Hosting, a fine company that has given me very few problems and good customer support when problems arose, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend A2 for your website. But I should point out that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of hosting companies out there (especially when you include resellers who sell space on another company's server) that are adequate to exemplary. You'll just have to choose.
Setup
Last Updated on Friday, April 23 2010 10:22 Written by Pierce Presley Wednesday, February 03 2010 04:00
Journalism Fast Forward is deliberately built using readily available tools with a very low entry threshold. This means Fantastico, Joomla, phpWiki and about a zillion extensions. (There will be some raw PHP and MySQL in later parts of the project, but even these will be presented through Joomla's Wrapper component.)
Development Server
Written by Pierce Presley Wednesday, February 03 2010 04:20
The short version: you're going to want to have a development server. This is a machine where you start with a copy of your current Web server, database software, programming languages and website files. This lets you make changes without taking down your website, or worse, breaking it.
While you can do a lot with a CMS right away, at some time you'll probably run up against a problem not addressed by the core functionality. This is where extensions come in. (Just to be confusing, not every CMS calls them "extensions"; some call them plugins; Joomla and some others have different kinds of extensions that do different things. But whether they're extensions, plugins, templates, modules or whatever, they either change the way the CMS looks, how it does things or what it can do.
You may have seen the long list of Joomla extensions Journalism Fast Forward has installed and thought, "that's a lot of code to work together." Even if you didn't, it really is, and since we're focussing on free and open source software, most if not all of the extensions installed were written and are maintained by volunteers. The exceptions are free extensions provided by companies or programmers who offer other extensions for sale, or offer plug-ins to their free extension, like the RocketTheme extensions. It's rarer in the extension world to find companies that try to make money on technical support services, like MySQL AB did before database giant Oracle bought them.
Because you don't know how these extensions will interact (or if they'll even work), it's nice to have a "website" that looks and acts like yours but won't leave people hanging if something goes south.
There are some people that would recommend making sure the operating system is the same. This is a problem for two reasons: first, matching the strange flavors of Windows or (usually) Linux on your Web host can be a pain; second, if the difference causes something to not work, it'll almost certainly not work on your dev server rather than the production server, so you'll hopefully never roll out something inoperative.
You could go around and get the various servers, languages, etc. and install them, but there will be quite enough of that during this project. I recommend you get an all-in-one installer like XAMPP or BitNami and skip a lot of the headache (the second really rocks because you can add in CMSes pretty painlessly).
Anyway, go set up your dev server and get ready to rumble!
— Pierce
Screencasting
Last Updated on Monday, April 19 2010 14:22 Written by Pierce Presley Wednesday, February 03 2010 11:19
Screencasting is, quite simply, recording a computer monitor or part thereof and saving the recording as a video file. The still image equivalent is called a screenshot.
There are a lot of different programs and, lately, websites that can do screencasting. In the installable software category, the leader has to be TechSmith's Camtasia. This is actually more of a video editing program that is optimized for screencasting. It can add transistions, titles and narration; it can do picture-in-picture with your webcam or another source. It costs $299, but if you were going to do even just a screencast a month, it would pay for itself with its robust feature set.
For those not wanting to shell out money, TechSmith also offers Jing, but I think that paying the annual $14.95 fee to go pro is well worth the money. Pro adds direct upload to YouTube and via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to Jing's screencasting and screenshot capabilities.
If you don't want to or can't download software to your computer, there are websites that can capture screencasts, including non-Web applications. My current favorite is ScreenToaster. It does a good job recording even full screen video at acceptable frame rates, can save to Quicktime format so you can more easily edit the screencast in a video editor.
A Note on AP Style
Written by Pierce Presley Friday, February 05 2010 12:00
I have been bathed in AP Style since I first entered my college newsroom. I have worked at an AP bureau, getting the job at least partly because I knew it so well. I think it's probably the best style guide for news people.
But I'm not going to be a slave to it, or indeed to any formal usage rules.
Why? Because this is my site, and if you don't get to ride your grammar and usage hobby horses on your own site, self-publishing is a hollow enterprise. And like Douglas Adams, I want to set the record straight—or at least firmly crooked.
This means I will be putting punctuation outside of quotation marks unless the quotation is a complete sentence. This means I will write "okay" and not use "Ark." with "Little Rock" and I may refer to ships using female pronouns.
I will likely hew to AP Style in most cases, out of habit if nothing else. More importantly, I will try to be consistent and have reasons for deviating. I may put together a style guide of my own.
