Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

this week at work

A few projects I’ve been a part of have rolled out over the past few days:

Rebuilding D.C. Schools
The Post published a three-part series about the state of D.C. public schools Sunday through today. The project included some massive online components. My favorite: The way-cool D.C. Schools Scorecard (designed by Nelson Hsu), an interactive map where you can narrow down schools by different criteria (such as grades, crime, health inspection scores, etc.). Backing up the scorecard is huge database of information about each school in the district. My contribution to the project was the design of these databased pages.

Two smaller things I’ve worked on:

• Mueller’s Travels - A companion piece for a story about FBI Director Robert Mueller’s use of an agency jet earmarked for counterterrorism eforts. Content-wise, it’s not too fancy — it mainly serves a locator map. But it’s also my first stab at making a map on my own using the Google Maps API (albeit based on some code that a coworker has been using for mapped features in the Arts & Living section). I really want to dig into it at some point and figure out how to make the code more efficient.
• Meet Mitt’s Boys - An interactive graphic to go with a story about how the sons of presidential candidate Mitt Romney are promoting their dad online via their MySpace pages and a blog on Romney’s campaign Web site. The graphic was a quick companion piece showing the blog and short bios of each brother.