The Nerd Blog
How we make stuff.
Secrets for data journalists, developers, newsroom designers, engagement specialists, and more.
-
How We Made ProPublica.org Look Better on Your Smartphone
In order to make our site more welcoming for the increasing number of you who read us on your smartphones, we've redesigned and re-engineered the site so that people on small screens will automatically see a version of the site optimized to fit them.
-
Introducing DocDiver
Today we’re launching a new feature that lets readers work alongside ProPublica reporters—and each other—to identify key bits of information in documents, and to share what they’ve found. We call it DocDiver.
-
Facebook for News Apps: How We Harnessed the Social Network for ‘The Opportunity Gap’
Embracing 'behavior design'—coupled with our preference for keeping our apps light on database writes—spurred us to integrate Facebook for our news app in a deeper way than we’ve done before.
-
TimelineSetter: Easy Timelines From Spreadsheets, Now Open to All
Last week we announced TimelineSetter, our new tool for creating beautiful interactive HTML timelines. Today, after a short private beta with some of our fellow news application developers, we’re opening the code to everyone.
-
TimelineSetter: A New Way to Display Timelines on the Web
As far as we know, there are no good open source frameworks that web developers can use to generate timelines quickly without losing design flexibility. So we made our own.
-
Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data
A series of programming and technical guides on how we collected data for Dollars for Docs.
-
The Coder’s Cause in “Dollars for Docs”
Public records, as a programming challenge, in our Dollars for Docs project.
-
Chapter 1. Using Google Refine to Clean Messy Data
How to use the Google Refine application to make sense of imperfectly recorded data.
-
Chapter 2: Reading Data from Flash Sites
How to read data from Flash-based websites, part of our data-scraping guide for Dollars for Docs.
-
Chapter 3: Turning PDFs to Text
Dollars for Docs Data Guide: A tutorial on several methods to convert PDFs to spreadsheets.
-
Chapter 4: Scraping Data from HTML
Dollars for Docs Data Guide: A tutorial on scraping HTML from websites.
-
Chapter 5: Getting Text Out of an Image-Only PDF
Dollars for Docs Data Guide: A tutorial on converting images of tabular data to actual text for a spreadsheet.
-
Open Source Project: Thinner
Today we're releasing a new open source project called "Thinner."
-
A Tale of Two Documents
On Oct. 8, we published an interactive comparing separate versions of the same court opinion in a lawsuit brought by a Gitmo detainee. Here's how we did it.
-
The Rainbow Connection: How We Made Our CDO Connections Graphic
On Wednesday, we launched an interactive news application to help readers understand the cross-owned nature of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) in 2006-2007. Here's how we did it.
-
Welcome to the Nerd Blog
Introducing our new Nerd Blog, which will let technical readers know what ProPublica’s News Applications desk is up to.
