Patrick Beeson

Latest blog entries

• Google makes local data, context vital

  Google's announcement that they would now be entering the data visualization game is a good thing for local news sites though it might not seem like it.

  This move has effectively brought the price of technology to the floor, and put the real value on the data, and stories that put that data in context. Especially important is local data; the kind of data that's often hard to get at unless you happen to have relationships with the local entities. And most local news sites have this in spades.

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • April 29, 2009
  • 7:21 a.m.
  • No comments

• Thoughts on UT event, free offer to students

  Last week's "Public conversation on Web journalism" event at the University of Tennessee brought out a who's who of Knoxville media professionals, myself included.

  But perhaps not surprisingly, much of the discussion at my table -- each professional spoke with several groups of students one-on-one -- centered on advertising and being flexible in what could be a terminally ill industry.

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • April 5, 2009
  • 10:35 p.m.
  • Eight comments

• RSS feed for comments on a Django blog entry

  Django makes it possible to have an RSS feed for everything. Of course, possible is not always easy.

  Sometimes it just takes a little logic, documentation and the help of programmers much smarter than I to get things done. In this case, it means building an RSS feed for comments on individual entries on my Django blog.

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • Feb. 22, 2009
  • 3:36 p.m.
  • Four comments

• How to stop spam on a Django blog

  Don't rely on the honey pot to attract, and hold at bay, spam comments for your Django blog.

  Stopping spam completely for a blog built using Django takes a three-pronged approach of Akismet, date-based closing of comments and a cron-run script that removes spam comments from your database. And fortunately, all three steps are quite easy to implement.

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • Feb. 21, 2009
  • 11:27 a.m.
  • Six comments

• January events for journalists, educators

  Socked in East Tennessee continues to get rain and cold, but for those journalists able to brave the weather there are two events of note.

  And lucky you: I'm part of both!

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • Jan. 10, 2009
  • 11:43 p.m.
  • No comments

• Filling gaps: Teaching site management at UT

  I began my first lecture of the semester for JN 422: Managing news Web sites on a cautionary note. The news business was changing, I said, and while everything you learned about journalism prior to this class was still useful, you need to know a thing or two about the Web if you want to go far.

  Little did I know that by the last lecture of the semester, mainstream media would be considered by many to be teetering on the brink of a complete meltdown (with the rest of the market), Web skills or not.

  But despite the economic meltdown of late, I believe my students ended on a positive note: They now know more about managing a news Web site than most folks working in the industry today.

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  • Patrick Beeson
  • Dec. 13, 2008
  • 6:17 p.m.
  • Nine comments

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