JeffCroft.com

BoomerGirl.com wins an EPpy

Those of you that follow my work my remember my design for BoomerGirl.com, an online magazine and community site for women of the so-called Baby Boomer generation. Well, that site was yesterday named the winner of the Editor and Publisher/MEDIAWEEK EPpy award for Best Newspaper-Affiliated Site (fewer than one million unique visitors per month) (all winners). The EPpys are probably the most prestigious awards in the journalism industry for interactive media, so I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Of course, I wouldn’t dare take all the credit. The site is the brainchild of Cathy Hamilton. Cathy and her crack team of thought leaders on this segment of the female population are responsible for all of the site’s content, and of course our technical team is responsible for the Django/Ellington publishing system. I only made it look pretty. :)

Our KUSports.com was also name Best Sports Site (fewer than one million unique visitors per month).

Congrats also to Khoi Vinh and and everyone at The New York Times, which won the counterpart award for newspaper-affiliated sites with more than one million unique visitors per month.

LOST-Theories.com updates

I spent a few evenings refactoring the code for LOST-Theories.com, the Django-powered site I created a year ago related to the hit TV show on ABC. I was still a Django newbie when I built the site, and the code was — shall we say — not great. It’s probably still not great, but it’s certainly a helluva lot better.

One of the things I did to make it better was to rely less on my own code. The Django community has been producing some great plug-able applications (in the vein of the “contrib” apps that come with Django) lately, and I’ve taken advantage of a couple of them. In particular, I’ve used Jonathan Buchanan’s django-voting package, which allows for super-easy digg-style voting on any object in your database, as well as James Bennett’s django-registration, which gives you you the typical user registration process whereby a user signs up and confirms their e-mail address before becoming a full-on member of the site. Here’s a look at django-voting in action on LOST-Theories.com. I also added a view of the most interesting theories — my take on Flickr’s “interestingness”.

LOST-Theories.com has really blown up in traffic the past few weeks. Yesterday (the day after the season finale), it got over 19,600 visits (according to Analytics). For the sake of comparison, this site got 1,215 visits and lawrence.com got about 6,500. Crazy.

Django applications galore

Besides voting and registration, there are Django apps on Google code for forums, blogs, and many other typical web apps. Many of the apps (like voting, for example), are written in a generic fashion so as to attach to any model you have in your app. For example, you could write a simple model for, say, recipes (which would take you all of 15 minutes, even if you don’t know Python), and “snap-on” django-voting, django-registration, django-tagging and django-discussion to build an app that lets people rate, tag, and discuss the recipes. You could even use Simon’s django-openid to allow OpenID sign-ins, if you want. It really can’t get much easier than that.

Serestandar.es postponed

In a bit of bad news, Serestandar.es, the conference I was asked to speak at in Seville, Spain, has been postponed due to some difficulty securing sponsorship. They tell me the conference will go on — but probably not until early 2008. Bummer. I really hope it does get rescheduled. I was really looking forward to seeing Spain, and meeting several Spanish readers of this site. Sorry, guys — hopefully I’ll still get out your way. Be sure to let the Serestandar folks know how much you want this conference to happen!