I’m currently using Stitcher almost exclusively for listening to podcasts. It’s fantastic. It works everywhere, stores lists of my favourites, and I don’t need to sync anything. There are a handful of podcasts I like that aren’t on Stitcher, but for pretty much everything else, I love it. Additionally I think the Downcast app for iOS is great if you’re looking for something to sync & listen offline.

New (or new to me) podcasts:

HackerNews Pod, or HNPod – generally around an hour, only 15 episodes so far, but have had great guests and interesting topics for developers.

http://hnpod.com 

Monocle 24 – I love the Monocle magazine, and now they have a series of podcasts I like, too. Specifically The Stack, which is about print media, but The Globalist, The Urbanist, The Menu, The Entrepreneurs, & Section D are all great.

http://monocle.com/24/

Jobs to be Done Radio – Fans of The Re-Wired Group or disciples of the Jobs-to-be-done framework will like this podcast talking about applying the methodology, product design and business.

http://jobstobedone.org/topics/radio/

Tools of Change for Publishing – O’Reilly has started producing an excellent podcast for people working in the publishing industry.

http://toc.oreilly.com/tag/toc-podcast

Thought-provoking stuff:

99% Invisible – My find of the year. 99% Invisible by Roman Mars is a fascinating look into design, architecture and how the things around us affect our communities. It’s so well-produced and researched. Much kudos to the team behind it, it sets a very high bar for podcast quality. Plus they’re all an ideal length at around 8–15 minutes.

http://99percentinvisible.org

Freakonomics Radio – Who didn’t love the Freakonomics books? Freakonomics Radio follows on from there and produces always surprising looks  into people’s behaviour. Looking at tough topics like is college worth it and $15 tomatoes keeps this podcast at the top of my queue each week.

www.freakonomics.com/radio/

NPR Planet Money – I have liked Planet Money for a while, but in 2012 it has just become a powerhouse of interesting and insightful reporting. Their conversations with economists on creating a fake, ideal political candidate and marketing him, for example, was a wonderful experiment. In these tough financial times, Planet Money is great for helping you to understand where the world’s money is going.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127413729

Short, daily tech updates:

I gave up listening to the longer, TWIT/TWIG episodes a long time ago. They just got to be too long and rambling for me. Now I generally listen to more focused shows, and for general tech news, I just listen to the following short shows in the morning on Stitcher before heading off to work:

TechCrunch Headlines

Tuaw Daily Update

Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing

Longer or more focused tech/start-up podcasts:

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders – a lecture series produced by Stanford University. It’s a weekly speaker series with leaders from technology, business and education such as Noam Wasserman, Melinda Gates, and more.

http://etl.stanford.edu/

The Industry -  A new voice in tech media, with Jared Erondu, Adam Stacoviak (formerly did the Founders Talk podcast series, which I also liked), and Drew Wilson. Interesting discussions about start-ups, design and tech. They even mentioned Woopie once so I like them even more.

http://theindustry.cc/category/podcast/

The Big Web Show – I’ve been a long-time fan of Jeffrey Zeldman’s show interviewing my internet heroes, it’s always interesting.

http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow

The JavaScript Show – Really well-produced JavaScript developer podcast, short and focused with always relevant content.

http://javascriptshow.com/

A Django Podcast – This may have ended, but has been good & would love to hear more episodes!

http://3rdaverad.io/shows/django-podcast/

Miscellaneous Fun stuff:

60-Second Mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/podcasts.cfm?type=60-second-mind

BrainStuff, from HowStuffWorks.com

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/hsw-shows/brain-stuff-podcast.htm

Latest in Paleo

- http://www.latestinpaleo.com/

Stuff You Missed in History Class

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/hsw-shows/stuff-you-missed-in-history-class-podcast.htm

Everyday Russian

http://everydayrussianlanguage.com/

Fast-forward 365 days. With five issues of Idea magazine published, we’re now working full-time on Woopie, our platform for producing digital publications and just won a place in the new Wayra Academy in Dublin. There are a lot of reasons Wayra is a great fit for us: the great network opportunities, solid start-ups to share with & learn from, huge support from a company that knows mobile & devices, the community space Wayra provides, etc. But to be honest, the greatest benefit for me right now is the freedom to focus.

Focus in any business is both critical and expensive. Building companies from scratch is costly, and until the businesses are generating revenue, you have to find other ways to pay your bills. It was important to me that we not go looking for money until we had something of value. I was wary of giving away our company before we even had anything, and bootstrapping was the right thing to do. So in order to fund my two companies which generate no revenue yet and cost me a lot of my own money, I have continued doing freelance work over the last year. Teaching in the evenings, client projects during evenings & weekends, contract work a couple of days a week, a day or two each week dedicated to Idea work, another couple of days for Woopie, and any additional time filled with community events and volunteering. Eventually, something had to give.

Earlier this summer, I began examining what I could hand off. I had many conversations with myself that went like this:

“But honestly, running this event only takes a few emails and a couple of blog posts each month.”

“But I really like volunteering, and it teaches me a lot about designing for users with different needs.”

“But I still have all of these great ideas for organisation X, I can’t abandon it now.”

In the end it comes down to the opportunity cost of focus. I am very grateful to Gareth Stenson for taking over OpenCoffee Dublin and the dynamic duo of Jeannette Vollmer and Christina Lynch for taking over and reviving Girl Geek Dinners. I have stepped down from volunteer work and teaching for now and have minimized community activities and speaking gigs.

All of these things are useful and have been invaluable in my career so far. But they each have a price. Even running an organisation which is free and involves “just a couple of blog posts” has a price. That price is focus. Every time I have to switch context, I lose time. I am slower at things. Developing all day in one language, going home to develop in another, and mentally working through different solutions takes a lot longer when you switch contexts frequently. Even setting up different work environments and rebuilding machines takes a not-insignificant amount of time.

                 image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/hussain_quantum

Being a part of Wayra means we get to focus on Woopie above everything else for the foreseeable future. It means I can expend all of my energy on working with customers, solving problems and building a great experience. I thought I would be reluctant to give away a part of our company, however small, but surprisingly it felt like exactly the right thing to do. Instead, it validated our approach so far and told us we are on to something that other people can believe in, too.

So instead of feeling like we were giving something away, it felt like we were being given the very precious gift of focus. It’s going to be a very busy six months as we revise our product fit and finish based on our customers’ feedback, and continue to design and build Woopie, but I could not be more excited.

The Big Idea is an audio addition to the magazine to continue on our theme for a few extra weeks. Each time we published an issue, I received a flurry of emails from people asking why we overlooked them, why they weren’t included, or with other stories of interest that we might have been able to cover given additional time.

The truth is that with each theme we’ve had, we could go on researching and writing indefinitely. There is no shortage of interesting people to write about and stories to tell in these areas. But eventually you have to hit the publish button. Our podcast lets us continue these conversations and get more involved with our themes and subjects.

So far it’s been a really fun experience, and I have to give my heartfelt thanks to all the podcast participants, who you’ll hear more from over the coming weeks, but also Dusty Rhodes and Digital Audio Productions whose excellent studio has helped us produce high-quality recordings. Dusty and his team are incredible.

For now, you can listen to our first episode below where I interview Brian Suda about being a Master Informatician and working with data and visualisations on a day-to-day basis.

This was a really well-run event, and I was impressed over and over by the forward-thinking attendees. I really enjoyed talks by Doug Belshaw and the team of Lesley Gourlay & Martin Oliver. I learned about using ePortfolios, creating mobile apps with students, using wikis and virtual worlds and many other innovative teaching techniques.

I’ve shared my slides below as I’ve gotten a few requests for them. My thanks to the ILTA committee for inviting me and for putting together such an interesting and energetic conference. I’m looking forward to using a lot of these techniques in my teaching strategies.

Designing Engaging and Enjoyable Long-Form Reading Experiences – guest article for Smashing Magazine

This article incorporates a lot of concepts that have been driving me crazy about digital content lately, some of which I’ve mentioned in this blog. Bad advertisements, disrespecting the reader, poorly chosen typography and lack of whitespace are just some of the concerns I cover here. If you’re spending time writing for the web, why not make sure it’s visible in a format that is inviting to the reader? Check out this article for ways to show your site or app’s visitors that you’re glad they’re there.

The Top 10 Ways to Create Digital Magazines – guest article for .net magazine

I wrote this post for .net magazine, one of my favourite magazines both in print and in digital, on some of the available methods and frameworks for creating digital magazines. I focused on systems which don’t export to just one platform as I don’t believe that’s a sustainable model for most publishers today. Instead I covered things like Laker Compendium (which we use for Idea magazine) and Treesaver that prioritize great web experiences over proprietary formats.

“Deep, Dark Secrets of Rupert Murdoch” – talk at Dublin’s #BeerMob event

At  the first (but hopefully not the last!) Dublin #BeerMob, we talked about topics of interest to those who are developing sites or apps for mobile. And there was beer. I talked about Rupert Murdoch of all people, and the secrets behind The Daily. I covered why this isn’t a sustainable method or one anyone should copy and what designers and developers should focus on instead for their users. Slides are below:

“Beware the Shiny” – talk at Refresh Dublin on March 15th

I spoke at Refresh Dublin this month on the topic of being cautious of trying to learn too many things all at once. Sounds like a strange topic from someone who lectures in web development! But I see a lot of students spin and spin, not building a foundation as they jump from one shiny framework to the next. We all want to learn new things and keep our skills competitive, but it’s important to do so in a sustainable manner. Below are my slides from the talk:

Guest podcast on the Small Business Show

I had the opportunity to speak with Conn and Kehlan this week on the Small Business Show podcast about current news items in the Irish world of SMEs.

http://www.focusmeireland.com/small-business-show-35-with-martha-rotter-of-idea-magazine

Guest podcast on the Technology.ie podcast with Stewart Curry

Stewart Curry and I chatted recently with Conn and Michele on the Technology.ie podcast, giving a behind-the-scenes view of Idea magazine and Woop.ie.

http://technology.ie/martha-rotter-and-stewart-curry-from-idea-magazine-tech-heroes-podcast-2/

Guest posts for Information Week during Mobile World Congress

Speaking of shiny things, I had the opportunity to attend Mobile World Congress and work with the Information Week team. Mobile World Congress is something I’ve wanted to attend for a long time, so it was great to get to help out such an excellent team. Below are some of the articles I contributed:

Samsung Galaxy Beam Turns Heads: MWC 2012

SecureVoice Encrypts Mobile VoIP Communications

Emporia Telecom: Mobile Phones for Elderly Users

9 Coolest Smartphones at Mobile World Congress

Coyote Systems Driver Info App Expands Across Europe

MWC 2012: Smartphone Apps, Gadgets for Cars

HTC One Smartphone Debut at MWC 2012

ON Voicefeed Aims to Modernize Mobile Voicemail

MWC 2012: Waterproof Your Smartphones, Tablets

Charity event 24theWeb creates websites for charities who can’t afford them in 24 hours.

StartupWeekend gets developers and designers together for a weekend to share ideas, build technology and launch start-ups.

Ireland’s 24 Hour Universal Design Challenge creates inclusive design solutions to produce usable environments, buildings and products.

And now in magazines as well, we’re seeing some really fascinating experiments in “what can we publish, given a finite amount of time?”

LONGSHOT

Longshot has now created two issues of its 48-hour magazine. The second issue, published in July 2011 was created between noon July 29th, 2011 and noon July 31st, 2011. Its theme was “Debt”, and you can read a web version here: http://two.longshotmag.com/ or order from MagCloud if you want a print copy.

The Atlantic has a great article about the methods and tools Longshot used to create their magazine so fast: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/the-almost-free-toolkit-we-use-to-make-longshot-magazine/242750/. In the article, Alexis Madrigal (who is both a founder of Longshot & a senior editor at The Atlantic) describes how they worked with thousands of people around the world who contributed content and managed things with free tools like Google Docs and Google Forms, raised money via Kickstarter, and posted updates to fans via Twitter, Tumblr and Google+.

Combining content from thousands of contributors, paring it down to the best of the best, editing and laying it out is no small feat. Doing it in a weekend is quite impressive. Unless you want to do it in a day…

24HOUR MAGAZINE

If 48 hours just seems a little too laid back for you, 24HourMagazine was conceptualized, produced and printed all in a single day with the motto, “1 day. 1 magazine. Start to finish. Scratch to print.”

Founders Tuffer Harris and Sam Mulkay, along with volunteers, created 24HourMagazine in a 24 hour period including topics on fashion, design, music, and lifestyle. The endeavour resulted in a 47-page magazine with no advertisements using a system called Issuu. During the short project, they allowed viewers to check in on progress via photo and video feeds as well as blog and Twitter updates.

Unfortunately it looks like the website is no longer active. However, Cool Hunting has some screen shots of what the completed magazine looked like, and it’s quite beautiful indeed: http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/24-hour-magazin.php.

16HOURS

“Okay,” you’re thinking. “Now this is just getting ridiculous.”  Fear not: 16HOURS is not what you might expect given the above magazines. 16 Hours, as the website states, “is the time difference between Calgary, Canada and Sydney, Australia”, which is where the two designing founders of the magazine live.

16HOURS currently has three issues available, and their website mentions that they’ll be open to accept Instagram submissions for their next issue starting February 16th. So it seems the next issue could be just around the corner. Follow them on Twitter to stay up-to-date.

Like Longshot, you can purchase 16HOURS print or digital editions on the MagCloud site. Issues include content from artists all over the world and based on the previews on the site and on MagCloud, they are beautifully designed.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

We often argue that we need more time, that we don’t have enough time, that our work would have been better if we had more time. But there is a need for deadlines, and restrictions have their place. Having unlimited resources, budget, and time may sound like a dream project, but with no goal post it can be tough to focus. Constraints force us to focus on the goal. The tougher the restrictions, the more creative we have to be.


Here’s an exercise to demonstrate the power of constraints:

1. Pick one task you need to do this week: a blog post, a chapter of a book, something you’re cooking, some photos you have to edit, something that requires more creativity or thought than “dropping off the recycling” or “buying groceries.” (On the other hand, if you needed to save time, you could try ordering groceries online instead and see how it works out for you!)
2. For whatever activity you choose, guesstimate how long it will take you. Give yourself half of that time to finish it. Impossible? See what happens. 
3. Pick another task & give yourself 25% of the time you think you need to finish it. I take no responsibility, however,  if you attempt to cook a chicken in 30 minutes and make yourself sick.

One way this sometimes works for me is that I just get it done. An article I think will take me 5–6 hours and I only have 2? It’s got to be more focused, so I spend more time up front outlining what I need to write. Whereas usually when I have more time, I go slowly, letting any semi-related thought into an early draft, only to be edited out later.

Another thing that happens is that I don’t get it all done. I sat down to edit all ten billion of my photos from India tonight, and I only made it through 3 days of the trip. Oh well. But still: I made it through three days & I can share those with friends & family, versus before when I was waiting until I happened to have a spare eight hours. A spare eight hours does not accidentally happen, at least not to me. So now, instead of endlessly postponing a task & feeling guilty about it, I have some amount of progress, however small. A dent is a dent.

SUMMARY

Websites can be designed & built in 24 hours. Design challenges to improve cities can be attacked in a weekend. A magazine can be produced in 48 hours or on opposite sides of the world. Whatever constraints are facing you are offering focus. Instead of assuming they’re hindering you, remember they’re there to help you progress.

I kept my list on tumblr here: http://thedailylesson.tumblr.com/.

It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Easier because when you pay attention, you’re picking up new things all day long. All it takes is writing down one of these things, and once you’re conscious of trying to find something, it comes pretty easily. Harder because it wasn’t part of my routine, and I would sometimes realize that, after a few weeks of having my head down working on something or a week away, I hadn’t updated in a while. Going back through email and Twitter and podcasts and Facebook to find something I had definitely learned that day was tedious, but I wanted to look back on the posts & know they were legit things I learned & not made up.

OBSERVATIONS

One thing I noticed after only three months was how much fun it was to look back already. Three months! Think about where you were in, for example, June 2009. In the absence of a life-changing event like a birth, death or marriage, it’s pretty hard to remember what was generally going on around that time. I have always kept hand-written journals but without them or my blogs or other online sources of events, pinpointing a point during that time other than “I was working at Microsoft in Ireland…I was probably giving some tech talks…?” is pretty tough, at least for me.

Some people would argue that *because* I have always kept journals I had relieved my brain of the need to recall great detail, sort of like the GTD philosophy. But I’ll leave that hypothesis alone for now.

What was most fascinating to me, however, is how vivid a memory I can get from a day with often just a line or two about what I learned. I look at April 5th & remember the tamale-making class I took with friends. Reading June 11th reminds me of my long conversation in a fishing shop when I bought my first rod probably since I was 14. November 3rd places me vividly in the place where I decided to go fulltime with Idea and Woopie and felt scared but more excited than I ever have about something I’ve worked on.

ANOTHER YEAR?

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to do it again. While it’s not really time-consuming, my schedule is going to be much busier this year than last and I don’t want to half-ass it. However if you’re looking for a fun and different new year’s resolution, this is a good one.

Today there are a growing number of news outlets doing a fantastic job of both publishing data and creating interactions and visualizations to make sense of it. I wanted to showcase a handful of those sites so that people can understand why this type of journalism is important and how it works. And maybe even how to get involved if it’s of interest to you.

DATA SET PROVIDERS:

There is no shortage of people providing data sets today, the only thing to learn is how to narrow it down to the most useful one for you.

Fingal Open Data is doing a nice job in Ireland encouraging councils to open up their data. Their site http://data.fingal.ie/ provides data in CSV, XML and KML formats, and they’re currently running a competition for people to build useful apps given the available data.

Additionally in Ireland, sites like Gavin Sheridan’s The Story and John Handelaar’s Kildare Street are excellent resources for presenting data but also learning more about the types of data available in Ireland

I mentioned The Guardian’s Data Blog in a recent post about news developer blogs as a great example of community building. But clearly it is also one of the best sources in the UK for a wide range of freely available data sets. For each set of data they post, they offer a download of the data and recommend that if you do anything with it, you post it to their Flickr group. They often have additional visualizations and comparisons as well.

There are loads of additional resources for finding data, the trick is knowing how to search for the information you need. Sites like ScraperWiki (https://scraperwiki.com/), DataSift (http://datasift.com/), The World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/),   BuzzData (http://buzzdata.com/) and more sites are growing and becoming available to the public for research and data mining.

NEWS APP EXAMPLES:

It’s no coincidence that a lot of my news app examples have shown up in prior blog posts – there are some organizations who are very seriously ahead of the pack in terms of understanding how news and technology work together. On one hand I am delighted to have bright minds like these folks paving the way! On the other hand, it makes me a little depressed when I realize that Ireland is nowhere near this level of thinking.

NPR’s StateImpact (http://stateimpact.npr.org/) is a collaboration among NPR and local public radio stations in eight pilot states to examine public policy issues in depth. They provide explanatory, data-driven stories focused on how people’s lives are affected by government decisions.

The New York Times definitely has a well-respected team of interactive news developers and infographic designers. However it’s not always very easy to find them on their site. The Multimedia page is the best resource I’ve found for taking a look at cool interactive apps and images they create, but Small labs Inc has also put together a nice collection here: http://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics/

The Chicago Tribune has some of the busiest & best news app builders in the United States today and they are constantly kicking out new, interesting information in nice visual formats. Check out their site which has apps in many areas including community, schools, business, politics and more.

ProPublica creates not only fantastic interactive news applications like Dollars for Docs (which I referenced in my Quantified Self talk on skin problems), they also create excellent reusable tools like DocDiver that allow readers to work with the ProPublica reporters.

DATA JOURNALISM RESOURCES:

To learn more about data journalism, here are a few useful sites to check out and blogs to follow:

The Data Journalism Handbook: a work-in-progress coordinated by the European Journalism Centre & the Open Knowledge Foundation launched at the Mozilla Festival in London on November 5th 2011.

Data Journalism Blog: http://www.datajournalismblog.com/

Hacks/Hackers: http://hackshackers.com A grassroots journalism organization on a mission to create a network of journalists and technologists who rethink the future of news and information.

ProPublica’s Dan Nguyen’s Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/doc-dollars-guides-collecting-the-data – a great introduction to how to grab data that is in maybe less-than-optimal formats.

Also from Dan Nguyen, The Bastards Book of Ruby http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ – an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts and anyone else who needs to make sense of data.

At the Society of News Design conference earlier this year, I went to some excellent talks by newsroom app developers who recommended that if you are thinking of going into this area, you need to know either Ruby on Rails or Django/Python, as those seem to be the dominant requested skills for news apps. I also liked this article recently on Poynter about using Backbone to create data news apps: http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/147605/how-journalists-can-use-backbone-to-create-data-driven-projects/. You don’t need to know everything, just pick one and start creating projects.

And lastly, from the perfect timing department, here’s Matt Stiles, who is a data journalist from NPR, talking very recently about best practices in building news apps:

Data Best Practices from StateImpact on Vimeo.

So today we’re answering your calls & opening up for subscriptions!  Subscriptions will begin with our next issue in February. And we have two reasons why you should get your subscription sooner rather than later:

1) Prices for annual subscriptions will go up shortly before the next issue (February 15th) launches, so make sure you get your subscription now to lock in a fantastic deal.

2) We have a special Christmas gift this week: one lucky subscriber will win a gorgeous DODOcase from our friends at http://clickcase.ie! If you haven’t taken a look at the DODOcase, it is stunning, constructed from black Moroccan cloth and bamboo, and was even chosen by Barack Obama for the presidential iPad. You’ll be the envy of everyone for your superb taste and quality.

Anyone who purchases a subscription for themselves or a friend between now and 12:00am December 25th (for the really last-minute gift givers) is entered to win the DODOcase, and we’ll post it on our site and email the winner on Christmas day.

I was surprised by the number of people who have honestly asked me, “Can you just put up a donation thing so we can make sure this keeps going?” It seems so unbelievable that today, in the middle of a tough recession, while governments and corporations are terrified of piracy, that there are people who are actually looking for ways to not get things for free. But along those lines we’ve also seen a lot of great websites and services go out of business because they never had a business model. This excellent blog post from Maciej at Pinboard describes exactly that phenomenon: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/.

So while we have a lot of creative plans in store for Idea, we’re also focusing on making sure it’s a sustainable effort and sticks around for a while. We’re committed to making this work and appreciate the kind words and support from everyone who liked what they saw and read so far. I won’t promise the business model will be the same this time next year, but I do promise that the magazine will still be here and hopefully by then fully supporting itself.

Thanks again for your enthusiasm!

And hey, the next issue is already kicking off! For those of you thinking about a change of pace to a startup or other small, fast-paced project and trying to run the numbers to see if it might work, we think we can help.

Well, our Idea consisted of:

• 3 core team members
• Over 30 contributors
• 21 logos
• 24 interviews
• 20MB of production files
• 6 digital formats
• Over 150 images, icons, logos, illustrations and photos
• Upwards of 15 frameworks evaluated
• Hundreds of emails, Twitter DMs, text messages and phone call
• Less than 20 in-person meetings
• Some Macs, a couple of PCs, some iPhones, a few iPads and a Windows Phone 7
• A handful of messy, convoluted platforms & workflows

And I’m not going to try to think about the collective hours. There are only so many hours in a day, and we all have full-time jobs and families. It was definitely a labour of love.

Cover Issue 1

Launching Idea Magazine was tough. I’ve been dreaming of creating Idea for years. On one hand, I just wanted to kick it out the door. On the other hand, I would have killed for another couple of weeks to make more fixes, edits, changes, revisions. But at some point you have to ship.

In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about digital publishing and creating an environment that both accommodates and enhances reading experiences. I’ve learned there are a lot of religious wars about reading formats, but that there isn’t “The One Best Way.” Mostly, though, I’ve learned how difficult it is to build, reformat and distribute these publications. I’ve watched as people struggle with CMS after CMS, built to publish but not built FOR the people who are publishing.

This can be better.

WOOPIE!
Stewart Curry, the incredibly talented designer that I somehow convinced to work on Idea with me, saw these same problems. As we worked together on building the platform for Idea, we realized we were going to need a system and that the method we were using was unsustainable. We decided to take some time to build a platform not just for Idea, but for other publications who are struggling with similar issues of usability, functionality and sustainability. We’re calling it WOOPIE, for Write Only Once, Publish It Everywhere. I’m going to take a much-needed break between now and the new year, and when I come back I’ll be focusing on that.

Making Idea come to life after thinking about it and believing in it for the last few years is honestly a dream come true. Building a platform to enable other people create something like this for their own communities is an amazing opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started.

[Oh, and yes, Tuesday Newsday will resume next week.]