USATODAY.com just put up a new photo gallery presentation, which I think is absolutely great. I didn't have anything to do with the project, but I will be able to take advantage of the plumbing behind it for other efforts.

Everything about the gallery is database-driven which makes it easy to get at specific slides or galleries from the back end. All the slides are tagged and categorized as well, which makes finding what you need much easier. I plan to have in-context mini-players all over the place, each pulling in related photos based on tag or category. We've already started this on our Topics Pages (example here), although we're using Daylife to supply the photos in this case.

I'm also working on moving our first effort at Reporter Index pages and site taxonomy-based index pages over to the Topics Pages infrastructure. There won't be a huge benefit to the readers from this, but the internal benefits will be many in terms of maintainability and flexibility of the presentation and underlying data architecture. The original work on the existing Reporter Index pages was done in 2006 with about 2 days of effort (and it shows). Nobody even asked for this, I just realized one day that I could produce these pages based on what I already stored in the database, so I just did it. Now this needs to be revisited and refactored.

Just brought a new feature online on our site, highlighting the work that our innovation team, including myself, is doing. We're calling it USATODAY.com Labs, and in this new blog we'll write about upcoming projects, new thoughts and ideas that we have for product innovation and the like. Let us know what you think.

FINALLY! We got the inline linking services launched on Monday and so far, things look good. Now our stories have inline hyperlinks in them, rather than just a block of links (tags) in between the 4th and 5th paragraphs. It will be interesting to see if this drives any additional clicks to our topic pages, or if readers are just as numb to inline links as they are to other forms of navigation and linking strategies on most sites.

Many thanks to our friends at mSpoke for helping us get this on the site.

This is a very important project I was involved in early on, to track the data behind our fallen soliders in Iraq and Afghanistan. I did some of the early database and data architecture work.

The war casualties data can be found here.

I have just one question:

What is up with this ridiculous "we need a new CMS" mantra?

We use a home-grown online CMS, that is incredibly efficient at managing the page-container-fragment hierarchy required to build consistently styled and structured web pages. The system doesn't care if the fragment assigned to a given container is a static piece of HTML, some javascript, an ASP.NET user control, whatever. So ultimately it is quite a flexible system.

But inevitably, every time a need arises for a page to look, act or behave differently from our standard set of page templates, the cry goes up for a new CMS. It's too bad the town criers are confusing the CMS with the story and front editing tools sititng on top of it.

How about you guys let those of us who have a deep understanding of how content is stored and retrieved and how web pages are built make the decisions about whether or not a "new CMS" is needed, eh? How about you just try to describe business requirements, and not prescribe technology solutions, eh? How about that? Then maybe we could actually get down to discussing the real issues, and not the red herrings.

For about a month now, we've been working on a publishing system that will embed useful (hopefully) inline links in our stories. This isn't new - other newspaper websites (The New York Times, for example) have been doing this, some for years. But it's new to us and is certain to raise awareness (and maybe hackles) in the newsroom.

My biggest challenge is training the entity extraction system. The term "Jewel" means nothing in the News/Politics section, but has definite meaning in the Life/Music section. Is "Davenport" referring to Iowa, South Carolina or someone's last name? Is it "Michael Jordan" the retired basketball star or "Michael Jordan" the former CEO of EDS? If you're in the Sports section, it should be obvious. Can we expect an automated system to do this? I hope so - I'm working with a company called mSpoke to try to get this accomplished.

The new links will go live on the site some time next week.