OpenBlock Blog

OpenBlock 1.2 released

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:52:11 -0400

I am happy to announce that I’ve just made a new stable release of OpenBlock! A few highlights of what’s in 1.2:

Many tweaks to the public site, including: a more useful default view of a news type (“Schema”), nicer-looking map, add/edit/delete forms with autocomplete for user-contributed “neighbornews” content.
Improved geocoding and better handling of some street names (eg. highways)
Many administrative UI improvements
Added a generic CSV scraper, and admin UI for loading CSV files by hand
Administrative moderation of comments
Lots of new hooks and template tags for people developing custom code
Python package API documentation
Over 30 bug fixes.

Get it now, or try out our amazon EC2 AMI to get it running in seconds.

…And Thanks For All the Fish

This will be the last release I make under OpenPlans’ grant from the Knight Foundation. I’ll still be around on the mailing list, but I won’t be working on the code much anymore. Of course, OpenBlock remains free and open source, so I encourage everybody to fork it and see what you can make with it.

I’d like to thank: Luke Tucker for hacking away with me on this all through 2010-2011, Frank Hebbert for shepherding us through the second half, Andy Cochran and Phil Ashlock for design work, Nick Grossman for getting us rolling; the Knight Foundation for funding our work; OpenPlans for being an unreasonably good place to work; Joel at the Globe and Drew, Chris, and Andy at the Columbia Tribune for being great and patient partners; Rob Miller for getting OpenPlans involved; Ryan Thornburg for showing early enthusiasm and following through with OpenRural; the Caktus crew for the patches; Tim Shedor for doing an awesome job on larryville; everybody on the ebcode list for being the reason to do it; and crucially, Adrian Holovaty and the rest of the Everyblock.com crew for creating it in the first place. I hope I didn’t forget anybody, but I’m sure I did.

- Paul Winkler

OpenRural: Building Trust With a Penny Press for the Digital Age

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:31:08 -0500

Ryan Thornburg writes about OpenRural, an OpenBlock powered project:

OpenRural aims to lower the cost of gathering and publishing basic data about government and public life. Property sales, arrest reports, new business openings and restaurant inspections have long been a staple of community newspapers. But until now, publishing them has required a reporter to go down to a county office, pick up a piece of paper, and re-type the information into her newspaper’s publishing system. We aim to automate as much of that as possible. Lowering costs and serving an audience across all demographics, OpenBlock appears to meet all the requirements for itself being a penny press for the digital age. But generating cheap content doesn’t solve the revenue problem in a world of abundance and bad competitors who are willing to provide a similar or better service for even lower margins. The only way that OpenBlock — or any penny press in the digital age — is going to solve revenue woes is by increasing audience loyalty in both print and online. If OpenBlock lowers the cost of collecting and publishing commodity news in rural markets and staves off some bad competitors, then the next step will be for publishers to reinvest the savings into high-quality, high-impact public affairs reporting. Reporters who once gathered paper and went to meetings will need to do more stories about the “how” and the “why” rather than simply the who, what, when and where. For these rural communities to lift themselves out of poverty, they need to be able to look at trends in the data.

OpenBlock Rural at SxSW!

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:28:38 -0500

In the 19th century, the “penny press” revolutionized journalism by covering news that appealed to the broadest possible public. Today, as media organizations struggle to monetize online coverage and chase tech trends, they have all but abandoned less-than-affluent readers — and with them, the commitment to public service journalism. According to Pew, fewer than half of Americans who make under $75K a year go online for news. This panel will reconsider the digital divide in terms of information as well as technology. We’ll explore how low-income and working-class people – the majority of Americans – can be included in the future of online news. We’ll discuss new models for participatory, data-driven local journalism. We’re not trying to save newspapers or kill them off. Our aim is to help bring journalism back to those who punch a clock. This Future of Journalism Track is sponsored by The Knight Foundation.

Saturday, March 10. 9:30AM -10:30AM. Sheraton Austin. Capitol ABCD.

LarryvilleKU goes live with OpenBlock

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:07:03 -0500

LarryvilleKU was launched on Feb. 2 this week, bringing OpenBlock to the University of Kansas community.

According to project lead Tim Shedor, the site is a joint venture of the KU School of Journalism and the Daily Kansan. It was funded by a Knight Foundation grant.

Check out the cool theme they developed, which re-flows dynamically to work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Congratulations to Tim and the LarryvilleKU team — great job!

OpenRural: Ryan Thornburg on challenges of geospatial data

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:30:25 -0500

OpenRural: Ryan Thornburg on challenges of geospatial data

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 3: External Geocoders

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:15:30 -0500

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 3: External Geocoders:

The Caktus developers working on OpenRural continue their excellent dive into OpenBlock’s geocoder.

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 2: Text Parsing and Entity Extraction

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:52:49 -0500

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 2: Text Parsing and Entity Extraction:

The Caktus developers continue their excellent series on geocoding with OpenBlock.

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 1: Data Model and Geocoding

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:46:22 -0500

OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 1: Data Model and Geocoding:

The guys at Caktus have started an excellent blog about their OpenBlock work.
The first post is a quick - but detailed - tour of using OpenBlock’s spatial data. Very well done!

OpenBlock at Kent State and University of Kansas

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:40:31 -0500

We’ve just learned about two efforts to work with OpenBlock at university journalism schools! From http://www.aejmc.org/topics/archives/3412:

Through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AEJMC has funded ten proposals to develop innovative and creative academic applications of projects already funded through the Knight News Challenge…
Jacqueline Marino, Kent State University; “OpenBlock Campus”

Hyunjin Seo, University of Kansas. (OpenBlock) “LarryvilleKU: Web and Mobile Application of OpenBlock to The Kansan”

"This is an America where people still read and trust the local newspaper, where print advertising..."

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:01:07 -0400

“

This is an America where people still read and trust the local newspaper, where print advertising hasn’t completely migrated online. But it’s also an America where reporters keep their crime database in a 300-page Word document. It’s a place where the inspections department doesn’t have a live XML feed, and where they may even be a little reluctant to give you paper copies if they don’t recognize your face. And it’s a place where a good Python developer is darn hard to find.

OpenBlock Rural is going to help these rural newspapers get ahead of the oncoming wave of digital interlopers by lowering the cost of deploying OpenBlock and using it as a tool to engage younger audiences, as well as increase advertising revenue.

”

- Ryan Thornburg writes about OpenBlock in IdeaLab.

OpenBlock 1.1 Released

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:13:44 -0400

OpenBlock 1.1 has been released today! Highlights of this release:

Big shareable maps, for example http://bit.ly/njmZT6
Comments on NewsItems.
User-contributed “Neighbor Messages” and “Neighbor Events” news types.
Better support for running in a multi-city area.
Import Places from a CSV file via the admin UI.
Date and time picker widgets on forms, where relevant
Support for future events, not just recent news.
Added scrapers for Meetup.com, Flickr
Import locations from shapefiles in the admin UI
Import blocks from shapefiles in the admin UI

See the release notes for more details and upgrade instructions.

If you’re installing from scratch, see the install docs. (And if you’re in a hurry, try the Amazon EC2 AMI.)

OpenBlock presentation at PyGotham, 2011-09-16

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:21:00 -0400

Paul Winkler will talk about OpenBlock, an open-source (GPL) hyperlocal news website / service built on Django. This talk will be an overview of the project: what it does, how it works, its history and future. And a brief live demonstration.

“OpenBlock: Hyperlocal Django”
by Paul Winkler
at 3:15 EDT, Friday 2011-09-16
Room 6

PYGOTHAM:
http://pygotham.org/
Registration: https://pygotham.org/accounts/register/
New York City’s first Python programmers conference.
Sept 16th & 17th, 2011
Executive Conference Center: 1601 Broadway – 8th Floor
Entrance on 48th Street, New York, NY 10019

Student with valid ID: $100, Individual: $200, Corporate: $300
(Building entry requires advance registration)

Mobile schedule app:
http://pygotham.org/app/

Flickr photos on the OpenBlock demo.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:52:06 -0400

Flickr photos on the OpenBlock demo.:

Sadly I ran out of time to enable this before this morning’s screencast.

"OpenBlock is OpenPlans’ hyper-local news and data platform. How local? Hyper local, crazy local!..."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:35:23 -0400

“OpenBlock is OpenPlans’ hyper-local news and data platform. How local? Hyper local, crazy local! Loco local! Your zip code, your neighborhood, your block… Just hitting version 1.0, OpenBlock dries out the crime blotter, stops new pushpins on the wall map, and takes away your village gossip’s exclusive on new stories.”

- OpenBlock is featured this week on the OpenPlans blog.

News from the hyperlocal news world

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:47:22 -0400

Here’s our latest email update, featuring

the forthcoming demo screencast
ONA11
highlights of version 1.0
a cute graphic of OpenBlock awesomeness

if you’d like to get the next update direct to your inbox, sign up from our homepage.

Join us for an OpenBlock screencast, 9/8

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:10:00 -0400

Curious about OpenBlock? Want to hear more about what goes on under the hood? Wondering how to go hyperlocal?

Tune in next week for an introductory screencast to the wonderful world of OpenBlock. We’ll explain some typical uses for OpenBlock, give a demo of current features, and take questions. Thursday September 8th, 11am-noon EDT.

Join the screencast here https://join.me/170-921-522.

For audio, dial 917 388-9050, room 7000 pin 1212.

If you’re curious about a particular topic, let us know with a comment below. Thanks!

OpenBlock 1.0 beta 1 released

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:02:00 -0400

OpenBlock is rapidly approaching a 1.0 release!

You can install the beta from python packages without needing to use git. This is documented in the updated install docs: http://openblockproject.org/docs/install/index.html

Highlights of this beta:

Different map icons for different news item types. To enable this, you can use the admin UI to configure “map icon url” or “map color” for a Schema.
There is a new streets.PlaceType model for categorizing Places. These also can have individual colors or icon URLs on the /maps/ view. (Original ticket title was “‘Landmark’ location type”)
The REST API now allows creation of NewsItems via POST, requiring either an API key or basic auth. API keys may be created on a user’s account page. We also support configurable throttling.
Import US Zip Codes as Locations, via the admin UI.
Work-in-progress: user-submitted content. See code in the ebpub/neighbornews app.
Work-in-progress: Maps you can share just by copy/pasting a URL. For a sneak preview, browse to /maps/.
Lots of minor improvements to the admin UI, including much-improved map controls.
Lots of documentation updates.

Complete release notes are at http://openblockproject.org/docs/release_notes.html

OpenBlock Rural is a winner of 2011 Knight News Challenge

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:39:33 -0400

OpenBlock Rural is a winner of 2011 Knight News Challenge:

This was just announced today. Congratulations to Ryan Thornburg, we’re very excited to see this happening!

Openblock at IRE 2011

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:35:00 -0400

We’re at IRE 2011 in Orlando, exhibiting OpenBlock and spreading the good news about open source hyperlocal. Find us in the lobby area, or come and see a demonstration at 2:15pm! Our session will be a gentle introduction to the wonders of OpenBlock. Paul will demo the latest features and the admin interface, and Frank will chat about the project. We’ll cover what OpenBlock is, and give some examples of how you can use it. We’ll also talk about data sources, and getting started - including what kind of technical expertise will be needed. And we’ll talk about the project being 100% free and open source, and how you can get involved in shaping future features. Come with your questions - we’ll leave plenty of time for them at the end. See you at the demo, or stop by our table any time this afternoon.

OpenBlock 1.0 alpha 1 released

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:47:00 -0400

Just in time for the IRE conference, here’s our first official (alpha) release of OpenBlock!
If you’ve been considering installing OpenBlock, now is a good time to give it a whirl.

Download a zip file of the code here, then head on over to the new improved installation docs.