Tag Archives: print

Mar 15

Tract Association of Friends

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Tract Association of FriendsThe Tract Asso­ci­a­tion is ven­er­a­ble Quaker pub­lisher dat­ing back to the early part of the Nine­teenth Cen­tury. They had a web­site but wanted a new one built with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that would allow for eas­ier edit­ing. The new site is built in Word­Press. Befit­ting the organization’s ethos, the site is rel­a­tively plain but there’s a lot going on under­neath the surface.

Many peo­ple use the site to print out copies of the tracts. There’s a spe­cial print stylesheet–created by the tem­plate designer and cus­tomized by me–that means print-outs of these pages will be very clean and unclut­tered, per­fect for per­sonal pho­to­copy­ing. There’s the abil­ity to make tracts avail­able as PDFs through Scribd and there’s a inter­face in the Word­Press dash­board to allow embed­ding of these in the sidebar.
Jan 13

Philadelphia Metropolis

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Metropolis - Philadelphia News and Journalism

Metrop­o­lis is a “news, analy­sis and com­men­tary” site from vet­eran Philadel­phia reporter Tom Fer­rick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadel­phia Inquirer, Tom’s spent the last half-dozen years talk­ing to every­one who will lis­ten about the future of print and Philly news. He’s done talk­ing and is show­ing what can be done on a bud­get bud­get. From “This is Metrop­o­lis,” the lead article:

Local news­pa­pers, TV and radio sta­tions are retreat­ing from in-depth cov­er­age of regional news either due to eco­nomic or audi­ence considerations.

The retreat has been grad­ual, but no one expects it to stop. The com­pany that owns the region’s largest news­pa­pers — the Inquirer and Daily News — is in bank­ruptcy. The size of the edi­to­r­ial staffs at the papers con­tin­ues to shrink. The prog­no­sis for metro dailies here and else­where is not good. The jour­nal­ism prac­ticed by these papers is still robust, but the eco­nomic model that has sus­tained it is erod­ing. If these tra­di­tional sources of news fal­ter or fail what will take their place?

The site was built in Mov­able Type. The most promi­nent fea­ture is the slideshow dis­play of fea­tured arti­cles. Tom has seen a sim­i­lar effect on another jour­nal­ism site and a search found the “Slid­ing Hor­i­zon­tal Ban­ner Rota­tor” at Active Den, a great site to pur­chase pre-built Flash files. Mov­able Type entries are out­fit­ted with cus­tom fields to enter images and links. Mov­able Type then cre­ates a cus­tom XML file for the “Main Sto­ries” feed, which is then picked up and dis­played by the Flash ban­ner. In addi­tion, the site uses Google Adsense to pro­vide income.

Visit: Philadel­phia Metropolis

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