Word clouds made easy

Thanks to @ericasmith, I learned about http://wordle.net, which creates word clouds in super-easy format. It takes all the words of any text you put into it and spits out something like what you see below. The bigger the font for a word, the more often it was mentioned in a text.
Once you create one, you [...]

Evangelizing Twitter

Here are excerpts from an e-mail I wrote to another online editor last night who is going through a hard time convincing her staff to embrace Twitter (and the Web in general). I hope my advice works for her.
Hi!
I’ve been reading your blog, so I know pretty much what you’ve been going through.
Here’s how it [...]

Databases don’t have to be boring

Let me start this by saying I don’t know how to build a database, but I’m the Statesman’s database guy.
Instead of building databases the old-fashioned way (with language I don’t understand and mind-bending logic questions that  hurt my head to think about), we use Caspio.
I learned it on the fly, with the help of my [...]

Twittering the news the right way

When I started Twittering as @statesman, I immediately looked around to see how this is being done. Surely, I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, right?
After a quick Google search, I found this blog by Erica Smith that keeps track of newspapers that Twitter. I was surprised to see that many newspapers had a Twitter account. What [...]

Starting to blog again

It has been a long time since I have blogged regularly, but I think the time has come. I Twitter all the time, but it’s time to say some things in >140 characters.
I won’t post things unless they’re useful. I’ll focus mostly on my trade (journalism) but I’ll also post whatever I find amusing.
To catch [...]