mericson

Years ago, I used to use a program called FolderShare, which was later purchased by Microsoft and renamed umpteen times to match the branding strategy of the moment.

I’ve always been amused by how the Wikipedia article starts off: “Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync) is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft …”

John helped get me and my college roommate started with Linux system administration and web development three decades ago. We both grew up in in the town in Iowa where John lived, and my roommate had met him around the time we went to college in the mid nineties. We were both nerdy engineering majors who had gotten exposed to Unix through our college dial-up shell accounts, and we had managed to scavenge together enough computer parts — an old 386 motherboard, a discarded hard drive that just needed a molex connector soldered back onto it, a spare floppy drive — to assemble a computer just barely capable of running Linux.

I remember lugging it all over to John’s basement where he helped us install Slackware Linux from a giant stack of 5 1/4 floppies he had.

Later, when John was running up a dial-up ISP in town, he let us park that server at his ISP, so we had a full Linux server of our own connected to a T1 with its own public IP address, and where we had root access and could experiment with running our own web and email servers and other such things. Back then in dial-up days, having a Linux server of our own on the Internet seemed unbelievable, and I will always be deeply appreciative to John for that opportunity.

In addition to using Google Docs for articles that don’t fit nicely in the CMS, we also have our internal newsroom wiki powered by Google Docs, too. We’ve open sourced the code for that here:

https://github.com/nytimes/library/

"You're not trying to make a .INI file a little friendlier for a human programmer -- you're trying to make a collaborative Google doc a little friendlier for a parser."

That's exactly what we were aiming for. TOML, which I think is brilliant for config files, was actually a bit of an inspiration for this.

But for our use case, which typically involves longer copy blocks, TOML still felt closer to something a developer might grok than to something a reporter would intuitively understand.

It's also worth noting we make abundant use of other formats in our interactive graphics — from JSON to CSV to YAML — when the data is much more structured and unlikely to be touched by a wider group of people in the newsroom.

This is pretty clearly not a solution to all structured data; but rather, just the subset that we want to be easy to write and edit.

When the bubbles were done as SVG elements, the animation in Firefox became _painfully_ slow. Felt like just a couple frames per second, maybe. (In contrast, the animation was fine in WebKit-based browsers).