The Daily Telegram in Adrian, Mich., used a Google Gadget some Zope know-how and great planning to deliver live election results on their homepage last week. The result was a nice bump in traffic and nearly a minute great time on site than a typical day.
Here's Telegram special projects editor Erik Gable: "Like most newsrooms, we track vote totals precinct by precinct over the course of an election night, with some precincts reporting almost as soon as polls close and others taking two or three hours. We've used the election ticker function in Zope in the past, but having to go back and forth from our spreadsheet to the CMS, entering data manually the whole time, was a time-consuming process and we inevitably fell behind.
"This year, we used Google Docs for the spreadsheet, allowing us to share it between multiple users in the newsroom, and fed the data directly from the spreadsheet into a widget on our homepage. All you need is a Google account, a working knowledge of spreadsheet formulas, and the HTML widget in Zope."
Time on site per visit election day increased to more than four minutes, where on a typical day it hovers around three minutes and 15 seconds. This is evidence the visitors were paying close attention to the updates in the spreadsheet widget and other news update as the evening unfolded.
Some images of the Telegram's work are included with this post. To pull off a similar project takes a good understanding of working with widgets in Zope, Google Gadgets and some HTML knowledge. Erik has pulled together a step-by-step guide. Please reach out to me at cbiondi@gatehousemedia.com if you would like more information.
The Daily Telegram in Adrian, Mich., used a Google Gadget some Zope know-how and great planning to deliver live election results on their homepage last week. The result was a nice bump in traffic and nearly a minute great time on site than a typical day.
Here's Telegram special projects editor Erik Gable: "Like most newsrooms, we track vote totals precinct by precinct over the course of an election night, with some precincts reporting almost as soon as polls close and others taking two or three hours. We've used the election ticker function in Zope in the past, but having to go back and forth from our spreadsheet to the CMS, entering data manually the whole time, was a time-consuming process and we inevitably fell behind.
"This year, we used Google Docs for the spreadsheet, allowing us to share it between multiple users in the newsroom, and fed the data directly from the spreadsheet into a widget on our homepage. All you need is a Google account, a working knowledge of spreadsheet formulas, and the HTML widget in Zope."
Time on site per visit election day increased to more than four minutes, where on a typical day it hovers around three minutes and 15 seconds. This is evidence the visitors were paying close attention to the updates in the spreadsheet widget and other news update as the evening unfolded.
Some images of the Telegram's work are included with this post. To pull off a similar project takes a good understanding of working with widgets in Zope, Google Gadgets and some HTML knowledge. Erik has pulled together a step-by-step guide. Please reach out to me at cbiondi@gatehousemedia.com if you would like more information.
