Proud papa

Yesterday a site I designed went live. My employer had taken over management of an online academic journal—the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance—but in its 1994-2006 version, the method was simply to post the text on static HTML pages or as PDFs.

When we took it over, it was clear there was a lot of potential for relaunching the site on blogging software—Wordpress—so that readers could give the authors direct, public feedback. While there are journals covering the same topic (Disasters Journal for example), ours is the only one set up to allow academic-quality writing with turnaround times of a month or less. This means, for better or worse, JHA isn’t peer-reviewed, but when a humanitarian crisis hits, researchers can get feedback almost right away.

Even though there was a built-in readership, I was shocked to fire up JHA this afternoon and see 9 comments on the newest article. It’s reassuring that after 24 hours a) the site works and b) the site works for the various kinds of people reading it. But the best thing of all is that something that challenged my coding knowledge ending up doing what it was intended to do, on time, and isn’t ugly.

There’s still more work to do. There are some bugs in the archives, our work-study folks will take months to get the 1994-2006 articles formatted and posted, and I haven’t done nearly enough testing for cross-browser compatibility, accessibility, and page sizes (the front page is 213kb, not acceptable for our readers in Africa). But it’s up, it works, and people like it. I’m very proud.

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  • http://infogluttony.blogspot.com/ jordon

    nicely done. do the comments post immediately, or are they vetted? this issue has been on my mind since that article gary kamiya wrote this week in salon about the impact of online feedback on journalism.

    it looks like there’s a good mixture of academic and biographical rejoinders. you wouldn’t see something like that in the “letters to the editor” issue of a print academic journal.

  • http://infogluttony.blogspot.com jordon

    nicely done. do the comments post immediately, or are they vetted? this issue has been on my mind since that article gary kamiya wrote this week in salon about the impact of online feedback on journalism.

    it looks like there’s a good mixture of academic and biographical rejoinders. you wouldn’t see something like that in the “letters to the editor” issue of a print academic journal.

  • Andrew Whitacre

    That’s a good question. As it’s set up now, though editors get an e-mail when a comment is submitted, comments post automatically without moderation. (In fact, I installed the “AJAX Comments” WordPress plugin—an example of a good use of AJAX, because it gives commenters immediate feedback on whether their comment was successfully posted. That’s important for JHA because there’s a good chance our commenters will be in a developing country with a spotty internet connection.)

    The staff is a bit concerned, though, that with such emotionally charged topics being written about that we might get some overemotional comments. It’s something we’ll have to keep an eye on.

    WordPress has a good deal of countermeasures, fortunately. It allows editors to set aside selective comments for moderation, such as any with more than one link (to combat spam) or any using certain words. So if we find that 50% of all comments that use “Qaeda” or “Bush” are inflamatory, we can put a hold on any that use those terms.

  • Andrew Whitacre

    That’s a good question. As it’s set up now, though editors get an e-mail when a comment is submitted, comments post automatically without moderation. (In fact, I installed the “AJAX Comments” WordPress plugin—an example of a good use of AJAX, because it gives commenters immediate feedback on whether their comment was successfully posted. That’s important for JHA because there’s a good chance our commenters will be in a developing country with a spotty internet connection.)

    The staff is a bit concerned, though, that with such emotionally charged topics being written about that we might get some overemotional comments. It’s something we’ll have to keep an eye on.

    WordPress has a good deal of countermeasures, fortunately. It allows editors to set aside selective comments for moderation, such as any with more than one link (to combat spam) or any using certain words. So if we find that 50% of all comments that use “Qaeda” or “Bush” are inflamatory, we can put a hold on any that use those terms.