Covering Kansas Democratic Caucus Results

I think we’re about ready for caucus results to start coming in.

We’re covering the Caucus results at LJWorld.com and on Twitter.

Turnout is extremely heavy. So much so that they had to split one of the caucus sites in two because the venue was full.

Later…

How did we do it?

We gained access to the media results page from the Kansas Democratic Party on Friday afternoon. On Sunday night I started writing a scraper/importer using BeautifulSoup and rouging out the Django models to represent the caucus data. I spent Monday refining the models, helper functions, and front-end hooks that our designers would need to visualize the data. Monday night and in to Tuesday morning was spent finishing off the importer script, exploring Google Charts, and making sure that Ben and Christian had everything they needed.

After a few hours of sleep, most of the morning was spent testing everything out on our staging server, fixing bugs, and improving performance. By early afternon Ben was wrapping up KTKA and Christian was still tweaking his design in Photoshop. Somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m. he started coding it up and pretty soon we had our results page running on test data on the staging server.

While the designers were finishing up I turned my focus to the planned Twitter feed. Thanks to some handy wrappers from James, I wrote a quick script that generated a short message based on the caucus results we had, compared it to the last version of the message, and sent a post to Twitter if the message had changed.

Once results started coming in, we activated our coverage. After fixing one quick bug, I’ve been spending most of the evening watching importers feed data in to our databases and watching the twitter script send out updates. Because we’ve been scraping the Kansas Democratic Party media results all night and showing them immediately, we’ve been picking up caucuses seconds after they’ve been reported and have been ahead of everything else I’ve looked at.

Because we just recently finished moving our various Kansas Weekly papers to Ellington and a unified set of templates, it was quite trivial to include detailed election results on the websites for The Lansing Current, Baldwin City Signal, Basehor Sentinel, The Chieftain, The De Soto Explorer, The Eudora News, Shawnee Dispatch, and The Tonganoxie Mirror

While there are definitely things we could have done better as a news organization (there always are), I’m quite pleased at what we’ve done tonight. Our servers hummed along quite nicely all night, we got information to our audience as quickly as possible, and generally things went quite smoothly. Many thanks to everyone involved.