Journalists need new tools to work online. I started building this online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I intend to launch publicly at some point.

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Updates

4-feb 2009, 9:29 p.m.

The site has officially migrated to the Society for News Design, with a new url:

http://toolkit.snd.org

The old url redirects in a basic way. Safe to assume a new design is on the way, plus new features.

5-jan 2009, 6:09 p.m.

Added RSS feeds for users.

3-jan 2009, 6:10 p.m.

Changed the way recently added tools are displayed. Tools are now sorted by date, so it's easy to tell how many tools were added on a given day.

Also, users are now listed alphabetically by username, with the five most recent users in a new column.

3-jan 2009, 10:13 a.m.

Added feeds by category. Easier than I expected, but I should stop being surprised by that.

Next up, feeds by user and feeds by link type.

2-jan 2009, 9:39 p.m.

Tags now show up on tool detail pages. They don't link anywhere, since I haven't built any tag detail views (or templates) but it's a start.

Added more categories:

  • data scraping
  • stress relief

Also added Resource as a link type.

Users are now paginated and ordered alphabetically, with the five most recently added users showing up in another column. We'll see how that works.

Oh, and I'm on vacation. Why am I working on this?

31-dec 2008, 12:55 p.m.

Added new categories:

  • Twitter
  • Social Networks
  • Text Editors
  • FTP

We now have 23 categories and about 50 tools. I'm adding new stuff as I find it.

30-dec 2008, 12:54 p.m.

Wrote an About page and Colophon. Added more templates to manage user accounts, specifically a password reset.

30-dec 2008, 2:24 a.m.

OK, it's launched. And just realized I need to write an About page. Tomorrow.

30-dec 2008, 1:53 a.m.

Wrote a custom template tag (subclassing the GenericContentNode in template_utils) to get the latest comments on a particular model. I'll use that again. Seems like something django.contrib.comments ought to include, especially since the custom manager is already there.

I'm about ready to call this thing done.

29-dec 2008, 6 p.m.

Added style.

Yes, the site isn't quite as ugly as it used to be, thanks entirely to Blueprint CSS.

28-dec 2008, 5:17 p.m.

Added pagination to the latest tools page.

27-dec 2008, 12 p.m.

Set up a redirect when a tool isn't found.

If there's a category in the url, the page redirects to that category (with an added line pointing to the add_tool view and the all_tools view). I'm trying to make this more wiki-like while retaining the taxonomy structure.

1-nov 2008, 3:39 p.m.

This project is mostly done, except for the obvious lack of style. I've added a few tweaks to it since I started.