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The Rapidian adds photo of the day archive and expands media map

George
George Wietor
11/09/11 05:39pm
commentary opinion
From the Staff: A quick round of up some of things we've been working on since The Rapidian was relaunched in mid-September
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From The Rapidian Staff

Each week, a Rapidian staffer will publish a piece related to goings-on at The Rapidiam, developments in the world of citizen journalism and ttips for making the most of the site. Click here for past editorials.

It’s been a little while since we rolled out the newest incarnation of The Rapidian, but we are still working on things behind the scenes. Here is a brief overview of a few of the new features our wonderful Drupal developer, Ron Woldyk, has quietly rolled out over the past couple of weeks. 

Photo of the Day gets its own archive gallery
Can you believe that one of our biggest daily features never had its own archive? Well, believe it. It’s true. Every day we feature an awesome new photo of the day from the collection submitted to The Rapidian’s Flickr group. Historically, at the end of the day, these beautiful selections would just disappear - blown away like so many Buddhist sand mandalas. But it was not an intentional ritual destruction, we just didn’t have any place for these images to go once their day in the sun had completed.

Enter the Photo of the Day picture archive. Now you can you browse through all of the past photos of the day with only one caveat. Because we changed the way that these daily front page photos are added to the system, we currently only have Photos of the Day listed in the archive from the day that we relaunched- September 15, 2011.

So, what’s next for the Photo of the Day? Well, first off, we would like to expand the archive to include the complete 2+ year history of the project. This is something that will take some time, but we are committed to making it happen (If you are looking for a low-pressure way of getting involved with The Rapidian, we would certainly welcome any volunteers in this endeavour). We would also like to build a better bridge between The Rapidian and Flickr, particularly for importing tags and mapping information.

 
Media Map
Speaking of mapping - another feature that has been developed more fully since our launch is the media map on the front page. Click anywhere on the little map at the bottom of the middle column and you will get a popup that looks like this: 
 
 
Now you will be able to more comfortably browse the newest stories by location, as long as the reporter included some location information in their article. We plan on jazzing this one up a little more too in the near future. Primarily by color-coding stories based on type, but it's going take a little bit to get there.
 
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about what we've been working on please feel free to let us know below. Particularly if you are interested in volunteering with the Photo of the Day archive project. We'd really appreciate it!

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Comments

erictank By: Eric Tank (erictank) on November 10th, 2011 at 4:34 pm

I would be happy to volunteer my time for this project. However, I won't have any free time until the new year. Keep me in mind if no one comes along before then, and I'll get back with you in January. Thanks. 

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