2006 – Matt Croydon::Postneo

My mail setup: Postifx, Dovecot, PostgreSQL, SASL, TLS, Amavis, SpamAssassin, and Postgrey on Ubuntu

Part of moving from several various hosting locations to one was figuring out my mail setup. I had originally planned to manage mail with a control panel provided by my VPS provider. The 1U server that I had co-located in Maryland for several years is still sitting in the middle of the den so I figured that the easier mail was to manage the more likely I would be to get off my butt and manage it. It turns out that there were some bugs with Ubuntu and the version of the control panel I was using, so I asked the VPS provider to reinstall a fresh clean copy of Ubuntu Server and I’d take it from there.

I have to say that I’ve been doing this Linux thing for some time now (remember downloading A, AP, D, K, etc disk sets?) and it seems like setting up a good mail server still one of the most tedious things to do, but boy does it feel good when you’re done. After quite a bit of research I settled on a virtual mailbox stack built on Postfix and Dovecot.

I’ve found that setting up a mail server is best done in pieces. Configure something, test to make sure that it works, add another piece, break it, fix it, test it again. I started out my setup with a basic Postfix installation as described on the Ubuntu wiki. Once that was working I moved to a virtual mailbox setup with flatfiles but eventually ditched that for a PostgreSQL setup as described at L’Xtreme after trying to get PAM and SASL authentication working with my flatfile setup. If you’re looking to start from scratch with a postfix setup using virtual mailboxes I would highly recommend the L’Xtreme setup.

The only snag I ran in to with the L’Xtreme instructions was generating CRYPTed passwords. I ended up using htpasswd from the apache2-utils package in Dapper Drake. Setting both auth_debug = yes and auth_debug_passwords = yes in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf helped me figure out the password mismatch that was going on.

Once I had the basic setup working with TLS and SASL authentication via pam authenticating to Postgres, I set out to lock down the system against spam. The first thing I did was to set up Amavisd-new running it through SpamAssassin and several plugins. That did a pretty good job but spam dropped to near zero as soon as I installed Postgrey. I used these instructions from Debian/Ubuntu tips and tricks. I tweaked the config files to whitelist quicker and reduced the greylist to 60 seconds from the default 5 minutes (to be a little nicer to legit mail servers). I’ve also been using pflogsumm.pl to keep an eye on stats.

Like I said, setting up a mail server can be quite frustrating, but it sure is satisfying once it’s humming along.

12/23/2006

Wii Internet Channel Drops

The Wii Internet channel dropped early this morning. Iâ€™m rounding up some screen shots on my Wii Internet Channel flickr set.

So far it seems pretty usable. Pages are rendered in fullscreen mode (sometimes wtih just a little scrolling if the page is wide. You scroll by hitting the B (trigger) button and moving the Wii remote. Zooming in and out is as simple as hitting the + or – keys. Due to the resolution of my TV it was necessary to zoom in on just about every page I went to. I found that the predictive text interface used while entering text in form fields to be good, definitely on par with my experiences with T9 and the Nokia 770 onscreen keyboard.

Adding favorites was quite easy (just click the star while you’re on a page then click the add button). After browsing around the web and snapping some pictures I went over to Wiicade to play some flash games.

I don’t see the Wii Internet Channel becoming my primary browser any time soon but I can’t wait to see more content designed for and adapted to the Wii platform.

Update: The demo video from Opera does a really good job at taking Opera on the Wii through its paces.

Opera on the Wii identifies itself as such: Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en

12/22/2006

Pardon the Dust

Sorry about the short outage there. I finally consolidated the various co-location, shared hosting, and virtual private hosting services that I was consuming every month in to one VPS account. I still have some legacy URLs to do some rewrite magic for, but the archives back to 2002 is here.

Because my new box is very Django-oriented, I am now running WordPress via PHP5 (FastCGI) and MySQL5 on lighttpd behind perlbal.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the move from WordPress on Apache with a really gnarly .htaccess file for URL rewriting to lighttpd was the simplicity of it all. Getting WordPress to “just work” for me on lighttpd was as simple as adding a 404 handler for the site:

server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php?error=404"

Everything should be smoothing out shortly and of course the eventual goal is to move this blog over to Django trunk. I did just that a few months ago but I need to revisit the code, find the importer, and give it a lot of layout love.

12/20/2006

Web Services with JSON and Lua

Iâ€™m still not sure why but today I wrote a web services client for the Yahoo! Traffic API using JSON and Lua.

According to Wikipedia, Lua is a lightweight scripting language commonly embedded for use as an in-game scripting language. While it is most commonly used in gaming, I think itâ€™s a simple but very powerful little scripting language.

While exploring Lua a bit I stumbled upon the socket library and decided to couple that with a JSON parser. The short and sweet program checks and prints out traffic information for Kansas City, Missouri in about 20 decently commented lines. Here is some example output from the program.

As with many short and sweet scripting language programs, this one relies on a few external libraries: Luasocket and JSON4Lua. The socket library uses Luaâ€™s C bindings to work its magic but JSON4Lua (and many other extensions) are written in pure Lua. Iâ€™ve always been a sucker for a good library written in pure Python, and as such I love pure Lua extensions too.

The JSON parser and HTTP library were particularly neat to work with, as was wrapping my head around Lua tables. Hereâ€™s the bit that parses the JSON response in to a Lua table:

results = JSON.decode(r)[â€ResultSetâ€][â€Resultâ€]

Lua tables are neat in that you can access them in dict or attribute style so the above code can be rewritten as such:

results = JSON.decode(r).ResultSet.Result

If youâ€™d like to read up on Lua a bit more I would suggest checking out the following sites:

Programming in Lua
Lua users wiki (check out LuaTutorial and LuaAddons)
Luaforge

10/5/2006

MobileHCI 2006 Roundup

I felt a certain disconnect between the academic world and the blogging world while trying to find coverage of MobileHCI 2006 in Espoo, Finland last week. The conference schedule [PDF] looked amazing, and I would totally have gone except for those 5000 miles between Kansas and Finland. Luckily there were a few people there blogging, snapping pics, and posting links. Please let me know if I’ve forgotten something.

Flickr tags: mobilehci and mobilehci2006.
Oliver Weidlich at Ideal Interfaces has a ton of posts (thanks!)
Oliver: Mobile Game Playability Heuristics
Oliver: Mobile HCI 2006 Kick-off
Oliver: Mobile devices and Fitness
Oliver: Best Mobile HCI presentations from Day 1
Oliver: Sometimes you forget where you are…
Oliver: Panel – Collaborative Mobile User Interface Design: How should companies design the mobile user interface together
Oliver: Nokia keynote
Oliver: Conference dinner
Jamie has some notes from Finland.
Jeremy Yuille: the interesting times have already begun.
Timo Arnall took some great photos. I’ll be catching up on his links and posts for some time.

While checking Technorati and Feedster for blog posts I stumbled upon a few gems that were not directly related to MobileHCI 2006. I’ll be catching up on Fabien Girardin’s thesis blog and reading about the future of Mobile HCI at ACM Queue over the next few days.

9/16/2006

Oh the CalDAV Possibilities

While checking up on the Darwin Calendar Server wiki the other day I noticed something I had missed last week: CalDAVTester. It is an exhaustive suite of tests written in Python with XML config files to verify that a CalDAV server implementation is properly implementing the spec.Â This suite of tests is going to prove very useful as more servers and clients implement the CalDAV spec.

Right now the biggest problem with CalDAV is a lack of clients and servers.Â That will change over the next 6-8 months as clients and servers are refined, released and rolled out.Â Hopefully the CalConnect group and an exhaustive suite of tests will help keep interop a high priority.

8/12/2006

Darwin Calendar Server

As soon as Gruber pointed out Darwin Calendar Server I felt like I had to check it out. I’ve played with Darwin Streaming Server in the past and love me some Webkit. I was pleasantly suprised to find that Darwin Calendar Server runs on top of Python and Twisted.

So away I went. I checked out the source and began to poke around. I managed to check out the source before the README was added so I did a fair amount of head scratching and wheel spinning, but it turns out that getting up and running is pretty easy: ./run -s

That sets up the server, downloading and building some prereqs as it goes. I already had some prereqs installed system wide so I can’t guarantee that this works, but I’m pretty sure that it has worked for others. I should take a second to qualify that I’m running OS X 10.4 with Python 2.4 installed. From there I copied over the sample config file (cp ./conf/repository-static.xml ./conf/repository-dev.xml) and immediately started troubleshooting SSL errors. First I installed PyOpenSSL and created a self-signed certificate. That yielded a brand new error: OpenSSL.SSL.Error: [('PEM routines', 'PEM_read_bio', 'no start line'), ('SSL routines', 'SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file', 'PEM lib')]

After doing that and getting some guidance from the folks in #collaboration on freenode I decided to hack away at the plist and disable SSL for now (change SSLEnable to false instead of true). From there I could run the server (./run) and bring up a directory listing my pointing to 127.0.0.1:8008.

From there I subscribed to the example payday calendar and the holiday calendar. It appears that iCal won’t do two-way CalDAV until Leopard, but in the meantime I was able to successfully set up and test Chandler.

This is some absolutely amazing tech in its infancy. I can’t wait to see where this goes and I’m excited that it’s built with tools that I’m familiar with (Python, Twisted, SQLite, iCal). It seems to me like this open source app is but the tip of the iceberg of collaboration features that will be baked in to OS X 10.5 desktop and server.Â I would also kill for a mobile device that spoke CalDAV natively so that I can replace my duct taped google calendar to iCal to iSync to 6682 workflow.

8/9/2006

VMWare Virtual Appliances

Server graphic from openclipart.org by Oliver Boyer A few weeks ago I downloaded the free version of VMWare Server to try out a few operating systems on my testbed Ubuntu box. Installation went quite well (even though it felt like I was building something from CPAN) and it even handled building some modules for the Linux kernel I had installed quite gracefully.

What I stumbled upon and have been thinking about off and on for the last few weeks is the selection of virtual appliances available for download. There are two pretty big things that you can do with this wide assortment of preconfigured images.

First, these virtual appliances are killer for evaluating applications, servers, and software stacks. If you’re evaluating mail platforms you can download the Open-Xchange appliance and run it with VMWare Player, testing it in a lab or with your existing infrastructure. If you’ve used SQL Server for years but want to see what else is out there you can experiment with PostgreSQL or MySQL appliances within a virtual sandbox.

The other killer feature of virtual appliances is that you can cram the functionality of several little pastic boxes in one relatively inexpensive box running Linux and VMWare Server. Load up a box with a couple of network cards and run a firewall, network attached storage, CRM software, and a PBX on it. This is the aspect of virtual appliances that VMWare is marketing well but I still think it’s a huge deal.

Many of these appliances take up very little disk space and othe resources which means you can pack them in pretty tight. You can replace several different servers or appliances with one physical box and operate multiple appliances for virtually zero additional cost. It’s also nice that there are a ton of virtual appliances from companies and hobbyists alike.

To be honest I’m not quite sure how VMWare isn’t loosing their shirt on this. Free appliances running with free (as in beer) software doesn’t bring in any money. They are however showing lots of people exactly how good their software is. Hopefully someone who loves VMWare server and player would be more likely to purchase a datacenter-quality product from VMWare over another vendor.

7/29/2006

Acknowledging the Mobile Web with Django

KTKA breaking news homepage I was reading up on HowToProvideAlternateViewsForMobileDevices on the Rails wiki this morning and couldn’t help but notice how much easier it is to set up a mobile version of a Django site. At World Online we have stripped-down barebones no frills “all we want are the facts ma’am” versions of all of our sites. They prove extremely useful during KU basketball games or when you’re in downtown lawrence and want to know what restaurants are open. Since our mobile sites are just alternate templates on the same views, setup goes something like this:

In main_site.settings:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
'/path/to/templates/mainsite.com/',
'/path/to/templates/default/',
)

In mobile_site.settings:

from main_site.settings import *
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
'/path/to/templates/mobile.mainsite.com/',
'/path/to/templates/default/'
)

The first line imports all of the settings from your main site. We then overwrite the TEMPLATE_DIRS setting to point to the mobile version of our templates (and fall back to default templates if there isn’t a mobile specific version). Because every app that we write also gets a default template we can have a complete mobile site up and running by creating just one or two mobile base templates.

While Django can’t help you debate internally the “one web” versus “two webs” philosophies, it can definitely help you produce lightweight mobile-friendly content with minimum effort.

7/26/2006

Gizmo for the 770!

Gizmo Project for the 770 dropped today.Â I found out when Russ called my mobile from his 770.Â The voice quality wasn’t as good as a landline to landline or landline to mobile but it was definitely better than the quick test I did with Jeff 770 to 770 using GTalk.Â I was also pleasantly suprised to notice that Gizmo’s calling within the USA is down to a penny a minute and prices to a couple of places in Europe are under 3 cents a minute.

7/13/2006

PyS60 1.3.8 Released

Python for S60 version 1.3.8, released specifically for S60 3rd Edition is now available for download. See the release notes for more information. Special thanks to Jukka and everyone else for pushing this release out the door just before Finland shuts down for the summer.

7/7/2006

Symbian: Quietly outperforming RAZRs and iPods

Earlier this evening I was reading this Fortune article on the success of the Motorola RAZR. While skimming the article I couldn’t help but look at the graphic to the right and say “that’s it?” My fellow Mobitopians and I have been watching the total number of Symbian phones shipped quietly and spectacularly increase. Here’s a quick breakdown:

End of 2003: 10 million cumulative units shipped.
End of 2004: 25 million cumulative units shipped.
End of 2005: 58.8 million cumulative units shipped.
End of Q1 2006: 70.5 million cumulative units shipped.

It’s been really amazing watching these quarterly reports over the years. The total number of units shipped per quarter continues to rise, and per usual, Symbian is quietly outselling RAZRs and iPods alike.

So congratulations, Apple and Motorola, you’ve shipped a lot of units. It’s time to get back to work though, you have some catching up to do.

Update: The Symbian numbers are indeed cumulative.Â I quoted cumulative units shipped because that’s what the chart from Fortune depicts.Â For further analysis, check out this post on techtype.

7/2/2006

Internet Tablet OS 2006 FINAL Drops

It’s not on the official Nokia software download page yet, but I just flashed my Nokia 770 to the final release of Internet Tablet OS 2006 from the Maemo download page.

I can’t wait to play with the gizmo 770 client.

The OS ships with links to tableteer.nokia.com, which looks really sweet on the 770 (see more screenshots here):

Nokia Tableteer

The application manager also includes http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/certified/ and http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/non-certified/ as default repositories. These currently only contain themes and a game, but there is tons of potential here. This is a great way to deploy new software for the 770 without requiring a flash. I would love it if the gizmo client or other official third-party apps end up in the certified repos and it would be great if Nokia made it easy for open source developers to get their software included in the non-certified repository.

6/30/2006

Internet Tablet OS 2006 BETA Application Repositories

Update: I have moved this list over to the maemo wiki which will contain the most up to date list of repositories.
I’ve been loving every minute of the release of the 2006 OS beta for my Nokia 770. Everything is just that much zippier and there are more built-in features including contact management, jabber/jingle support, and a boatload of other things.

One of the new features that I absolutely love is the new application manager. The 770 is built on a custom Debian build, so package management is done via APT. In the 2005 edition you had to point the package manager at individual .debs, handle dependencies yourself, and all that not-so-fun stuff. The 2006 OS ships with an enhanced package manager that you can point at repositories to handle everything for you.

Here’s a quick list of the repositories on my 770:

Maemo repository
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/
Distribution: mistral-beta
Components: free
Applications: Maemopad

Maemo Mapper
Web address: http://gnuite.com:8080/nokia770/
Distribution: mistral
Components: user
Applications: Maemo Mapper

FBReader
Web address: http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/
Distribution: mistral
Components: user
Applications: FBReader

Kernel Concepts
Web address: http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/nokia770/ex_2006/
Distribution: ./
Components: (blank)
Applications: GPE Calendar, GPE Contacts, GPE Todo

Maemo Hackers
Web address: http://maemo-hackers.org/apt/
Distribution: mistral
Components: main
Applications: maemo-gaim, osso-xterm, osso-statusbar, xchat

Python Repository
Web address: http://maemo.org.br/platform/apt/
Distribution: python
Components: python
Applications: Python and related bindings

To add new repositories to your 770 running the 2006 beta, hit Tools -> Application Manager, then hit the title bar or menu key, select Tools -> Application catalog… and away you go.

Update: Two new repositories ship by default with the final version of Internet Tablet OS 2006:

Nokia Tableteer
Web address: http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/certified/
Distribution: mistral
Components: user
Applications: Maemo-blocks, themes

Nokia Tableteer
Web address: http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/non-certified/
Distribution: mistral
Components: user
Applications: Hello world app, Maemo development examples

6/22/2006

Where 2.0: Madmen or Pure Genius?

While drooling over the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference schedule a week or so ago I noticed that except for a few keynotes, panels, and lightning talks, every talk at the conference is exactly 15 minutes long. At first I thought that O’Reilly was off their rocker, but if I had to play the odds, I’d have to bet that they’re on to something.

So almost all presentations are 15 minutes long. That means that there’s a good chance that I can figure out what each person is going to talk about by reading their blurb and possibly googling their name or (more often than not) heading over to their blog.

That’s the motivation for me to attend if I can pretty accurately guess what each person is going to talk about? Actually, I’m not. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to go (and I’d give my left kidney to attend the Google Geo developer day), but I just can’t justify $1500 plus travel and lodging. To be fair it would have been $400 less if I had hopped on the early bird special but it still would have cost more than I can afford to blow on a conference.

Per usual, this conference will have an insanely high concentration of really smart geo geeks, so there’s lots of hanging out to be done between conference sessions. I also really like the idea of having lots of 15 minute presentations in a single place rather than “tracking” sessions in several locations. Invariably I miss something really cool at a conference because there’s something else I want to catch at the same time.

I’m not sure how proven this conference format is, but I hope that it works. Except for the price tag, Where 2.0 almost has an “unconference” feel to it.

5/29/2006

GCALSYNC: Operator Lockdown Strikes Again?

I was catching up on reddit this morning and stumbled upon a link to GCALSYNC, a j2me app still in its early stages that allows you to sync your mobile phone’s calendar with your google calendar. I immediately got excited and went to try it out as a replacement for my current iCal/iSync setup.
I navigated over to wap.gcalsync.com using Opera on my Nokia 6682.

While I’m on the subject of Opera, if you’re using Opera for S60, run don’t walk to the 8.60 upgrade, it’s really amazing!

I downloaded the GCALSYNC jad, the installer launched, and I went through the usual “this is untrusted, install anyway?” dialog. This is something I’m used to, but I wasn’t ready for the “Authorization Failed” popup to end my install process.

I’m not sure if the install is failing because of a problem with the JAD/JAR or if the phone is refusing to install it because it uses the calendar API (or possibly another security API). My gut is telling me that it’s the latter because of an entry under known bugs on the GCALSYNC web page:

SecurityException: On Cingular (US mobile operator), the phone calendar is not available due to Cingular security restrictions. “Test” fails with a SecurityException whne testing phone calendar if you have this problem.

The workaround (if you ever manage to install it) is to bypass login information and link to your private calendar address, only allowing GCALSYNC to download information from your calendar, not upload information to it.

So what gives? Is the phone that I paid a decent chunk of change for (on contract) so locked down that I can’t use this compelling J2ME app on it? Is there any way that I (as an end user) or the developers of GCALSYNC can get around it?

I sure hope so, because this app looks totally awesome.

Update:

After catching up with me in the comments section of the GCALSYNC reddit post, Thomas has released an updated version which asks “pretty please” for permission to do something.Â With that modification GCALSYNC now installs on my phone.Â Thanks to Cingular’s lockdown though, I can only get at my calendars via the private feed which still means read-only data.

5/28/2006

XTech Papers and Slides

I’ve been watching Planet XTech from Kansas just dying to read slides and papers. I spotted Simon’s slides and notes the other day but didn’t notice the full papers on the XTech site until last night. More for my sanity than anything else I’ve compiled a list of papers and slides from XTech. Let me know if I’ve missed something.

Slides and notes (off-site):

Full papers (from the XTech site):

5/20/2006

Xgl

A week or so ago I managed to get Xgl working on a box at home using these instructions wtih an aging Nvidia card. I previously had issues getting it to work with an ATI card, but I think that had more to do with flgx and my rather old Radeon than anything else.

I was completely blown away when I started up XGL and enabled compiz for the first time. It brought an extra level of polish to the already amazing Dapper Drake. By default it enables several effects and features. Some are more whizzy than useful, but the alt-tab preview pane and expose-like features are quite useful. Less useful but still pretty are true transparency and the waving effect that happens when you drag a window.

Unfortunately running Xgl and compiz meant that things like emacs didn’t run at all, and other apps like Evolution behaved unpredictably.

That’s to be expected though. Xgl is still very much unstable and bleeding edge. Even if it’s not usable (for me) day in and day out, I think it’s a glimpse in to the future of desktop linux. The packages are available in the Universe repository for Dapper, but there are big warnings everywhere about their experimental nature.

I really hope that over the next six months Xgl matures and that by the time Edgy Eft is born Xgl will be ready for prime time, if not in the default install.

4/26/2006

My OSX Development Environment

My work powerbook was out at Apple for a week or so getting a tan, a new motherboard, memory, and processor. While it was out of town I settled in to a Linux development environment focused around Ubuntu Dapper, Emacs 22 + XFT (pretty anti-aliased fonts), and whatever else I needed. Ubuntu (and other apt-based systems) are great for hitting the ground running because you just install whatever you need on the fly only when you need it. I also got pretty in to emacs and all of the stuff that’s there by default with a source build of the development snapshot. My co-worker James helped me get through some of the newbie bumps of my emacs immersion program.

When the powerbook came back I decided it was time to reboot my development environment, so I started from scratch. Here’s what I installed, in the order that I installed it:

Updates. Oh. My. Goodness. I rebooted that thing so many times I started looking for a green start button.
Quicksilver (freeware): I use it all the time to get at stuff I need.
Transmit (commercial, $30): Worth every penny.
Firefox (open source): My browser of choice, though I really dig Safari’s rendering engine.
Textmate (commercial, 39 euro): I spend all day in this text editor and it rocks, though I do miss emacs.
Then I disabled capslock. I never hit it on purpose, it’s always getting in the way. I should really map a modifier key to it, but I’m not sure which one and I don’t know if I can convince my pinkey to hit it on purpose.
Xcode: A man has to have a compiler.
Subversion (open source): I used the Metissian installer since it has treated me well in the past, and I often have flashbacks of building subversion pre-1.0 from source.
Django (open source): I checked out trunk, .91, and magic-removal from svn.
Ellington (commercial, starting at $10-15k): I checked out ellington and other work stuff from our private repository.
Firebug: Essential for web development.
Python 2.4 (open source): I’m not a big fan of the Python 2.3 that ships with OSX.
Python Imaging Library (open source): It’d be really nice if this made its way in to the standard Python distro.
ElementTree (open source): I usually use either ElementTree or Sax for parsing XML documents.
GNU Wget (open source): It’s what I use to download stuff from the commandline.
PostgreSQL (open source): It probably hogs resources to always have this running in the background, but I use it often enough.
PostgreSQL startup item from entropy.ch
mxDateTime (open source): I’ve never really used it directly, but psycopg does.
Psycopg 1.x (open source): Django uses this to talk to Postgres.
Colloquy (open source): A really nice IRC client for OSX. I’m also rather fond of Irssi and screen over SSH.
Growl (open source): It’s not work critical but I like it.
Pearl Crescent Page Saver (freeware): I find it indispensable for taking screenshots of entire web pages.
Session Saver for Firefox: I hate looking at 15 different forum threads to find the latest version of this, but I love what it does for me.
Adium (open source): Best darned IM client for OSX that talks just about any protocol.

While I may have missed an app or two, I think that just about covers my OSX development and living environment. I find the Ubuntu desktop useful enough that it’s still humming under my desk at work. The work LCD has both analog and DVI inputs so I’m able to switch between my two-screened powerbook and a one-screened Linux desktop in a pseudo-KVM kind of way.

I can’t say enough how impressed I was with Dapper, and how productive it kept me. Aside from my emacs learning curve, I felt at home and had the command line and any app that I wanted to install at my disposal.

I hope that this laundry list is helpful, if nothing else it’ll be a place for me to start the next time I’m looking for a clean slate.

4/26/2006

Reader Submitted Content: Everybody Wins

I was enthralled to see a reader submitted photo on the front page of The Lawrence Journal-World this morning. It was located just below the fold and part of a followup story about hail damage from the storm on Sunday.

Reader submitted photos rounded out the coverage done by our awesome staff of photographers. In fact, reader submitted photos and those taken by our readers appeared side by side in the same online gallery.

While this might make some people a little uneasy, I think it’s perfect. There’s no way that we could produce a paper with the quality that our readers expect without our photographers. At the same time our photographers can’t be everywhere at once and it’s great to be able to expand our coverage with the help of our readers.

My co-worker David reminds me that we’re also changing the photo credit that runs in print from “Special to the Journal-World” to “Submitted online by” which should help spread the world and generate more content online that might see its way to print.

It’s a two-way street and everybody wins. We’re better because our readers submit content to us and we’re able to provide better coverage to them because of it.

4/25/2006

Year: 2006