By Jason Grosman (Programmer, Digital Media)

Before we release new code, such as our recent redesign, we do our best to test as well as possible, but we can't possibly figure out everything that could go wrong before we put it out there in the world. Even under the best circumstances, in a web site this complex and busy, problems will occur. Some of them are are avoidable, such as bugs in our code. And some of them are environmental issues, such as a network problem or database failure. Often, it's difficult to distinguish between the two. That's why it is essential to have a solid error handling system to track the errors as them come in, prioritize them, and give us enough information to be able to fix them.

Obviously, we have spent a lot of time building features of our system that users see. A large percentage of our time is also spent on error handling. The error handling system that we've developed has been through several rounds of incremental improvements, starting with writing to a log, then emailing a developer, and now updating our issue tracking system. These approaches are described below in greater detail.

Logging

Every time our PHP code encounters an error, it gets automatically logged by our Apache web servers. We have dozens of web servers and they generate thousands of lines of logging information every day. We could get lost in the torrential downpour of log messages. Parsing through the logs is a good way to track down a problem once we know about it, but it was horrendously inefficient way to stay on top of new issues as they come in. Not only were they coming in too fast for any one person to keep track of, they also didn't provide any context about what a user was doing when the error occurred (and context is critical to the fundamental truth of debugging code that you must be able to consistently reproduce the problem before you can fix it or test the fix).

The other problem with this kind of logging was that we were missing out on client side error messages. In the past year or so, NPR.org has added more and more javascript to support a growing list of features. This resulted in more client side errors, which were very hard to track. All of the different combinations of web browsers, browser settings, operating systems, proxy servers, etc., each one potentially handling our javascript differently, led to problems that we might never have encountered while testing in our limited set of test environments. And since they only occurred on the client machine, we would never know about them unless a user sent us an email or complained in some other way.

As a result, we implemented something last year that we call jslog. With AJAX, we are able to send messages back to the server without reloading the page. Now, every time one of our pages has a javascript error, instead of making the user's client browser handle the error, leading to a less than stellar user experience, we catch the error and send it to the server using AJAX to be logged in the Apache web server logs. This is completely transparent to the user and allows the page to keep loading, even if it is not 100% perfect.

Continue reading "What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org" >

By Mark Stencel and Keith Jenkins

YouTube announced today that NPR is one of a handful of news organizations pioneering YouTube Direct, a new tool that allows us to request, review and display video clips produced and submitted by YouTube users.

YouTube Direct will be embedded on NPR.org, where we can easily solicit user-generated video and feature the pieces our editors select. Our first project will focus on science. The WonderScope Challenge is an occasional series that solicits original video, art and animation related to a particular scientific concept -- and challenges users to "bring the abstract to life." The first concept we are inviting submissions on is "time"; the deadline is Thursday, December 17, at midnight. We'll solicit submissions via NPR.org, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

This is how it works:

1. We create an assignment, like the one described above.

2. Users upload their submissions via the submission box on the page.

3. All videos go into our "submission" box for review.

4. Once a submission is accepted, it is added to the playlist for that assignment. This playlist will be on the submission page and also be shown on our YouTube page. YouTube will also be promoting the assignments on their pages as well.

5. When we selected a user piece for our playlist, it will get a NPR icon attached that will travel with it wherever it is embedded -- on YouTube, our site or elsewhere. If we don't approve the piece, the video remains on the user's own YouTube page.

The WonderScope Challenge is our first foray with YouTube Direct. We're hoping that it will have a number of applications when it comes to collecting and curating user-generated videos. And as always, we welcome your feedback.

(Mark Stencel is NPR's managing editor for Digital News. Keith Jenkins is supervising senior producer for multimedia.)

By Andy Carvin (@acarvin)

On October 17-18 in Washington DC we held our first national PublicMediaCamp. I'm proud to say that it completely exceeded my expectations. Held in conjunction with PBS, American University's Center for Social Media and iStrategyLabs, PubCamp brought together more than 250 people from across the country, including bloggers, social media enthusiasts, techies and staff from around three dozen public media stations.

Following the model of BarCamp and PodCamp, PubCamp was organized, as it were, as an unconference. We encouraged participants to brainstorm session ideas on a wiki prior to the camp, but the schedule itself wasn't created until each morning's opening session. Anyone who wanted to lead a session had to announce it to the entire group; volunteers wrote down the session titles and gave them to me for placement on a paper chart mapping out which rooms and time slots were available. If you've never attended an unconference, it might come as a surprise that this method of event planning (or lack thereof) could actually work, but we ended up spawning more than 50 sessions over both days of the camp. Very few of these sessions were your typical conference PowerPoint presentation. in many cases, the session leader would make everyone rearrange the chairs in a circle so everyone could participate equally, which was heartening given the fact we tried to emphasize that attendees should see themselves as full-fledged participants rather than passive audience members.

The sessions themselves covered a range of issues, from strategies for stations to work with local bloggers to mobilizing volunteers during natural disasters. Many of the sessions managed to wrangle someone in the group to serve as official note taker; we've assembled these notes on the PubCamp wiki.

PubCamper John Proffitt put together this video capturing some of the scenes from PubCamp:

Continue reading "Reflections On PublicMediaCamp" >

By Mark Stencel

The NPR News staff is a chatty group, on-air and online -- as thousands of our Twitter followers and Facebook friends already know. Individual NPR journalists, from longtime host Scott Simon to new health blogger Scott Hensley, regularly muse online about their work and other subjects. Even the somewhat technical updates that our Digital Media staff posted on Twitter when we revamped NPR.org in July drew surprising interest and feedback.

Popular social media sites and services are great reporting tools. They help our journalists find and keep in contact with a wide range of sources. They also provide powerful ways to connect with our listeners and users and to share our journalism. But all of us at NPR News need to remember that, as journalists, we are just as responsible and accountable for what we say and do online as we are in other aspects of our lives.

Social media guidelines shared with the news staff on Thursday offer commonsense rules and reminders for those of us here who make use of these communication channels. Summarizing the guidance in an e-mail message, Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss urged the staff to "use social media for journalistic purposes and as a way to connect with the audience." Weiss also reminded our journalists -- including the engineering, operations and news administration staffs -- to avoid doing "anything online that will damage your credibility or the credibility of NPR."

Continue reading "Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era" >

By Robert Spier, Demian Perry and Daniel Jacobson

We have just released a new update to our NPR News iPhone app. (v1.2, if you're counting; we sure are!) It's ready for download from the iTunes Store. Here are some of the updates we've made to it:

Listen Live: Although NPR is not a radio station, we do "go live," over our member stations' broadcasts as well as from NPR.org, for major scheduled or unscheduled news events. With v1.2, we have now extended this capability to the iPhone; if NPR is in live coverage, you will receive a start-up alert inviting you to tune in. Down the line, we will improve the ways in which we notify iPhone app users about live coverage; we also anticipate presenting NPR Music live concerts.

A Better Audio Experience: v1.2 offers two improvements here: improved audio streaming in low bandwidth scenarios, and greater Playlist stability.

Sharing: We have added the ability for users to share, not just individual stories, but also many of the program episodes via email, Twitter and Facebook. We have also improved the Twitter share screens in particular.

Story Page & Images: We have improved the layout of individual story pages. And, if you enlarge any photo on a story page, you will now see an overlay presenting the full caption.

All in all, v1.2 offers a total of 32 improvements. Many of these are in response to your feedback via the NPR Facebook page, Twitter, other posts on this blog, iTunes reviews, etc. So, please, keep 'em coming -- we are already working on v1.3.

By Kinsey Wilson

The media landscape is changing at unprecedented speed. And news organizations everywhere are racing to keep up.

One way NPR tries to stay current is by connecting with people who are working at the forefront of technological change.

Usually, those are casual, behind-the-scenes encounters. But today, we've assembled an extraordinary group of technologists, entrepreneurs and innovators in San Francisco to spend the day thinking -- in public -- about NPR's future.

Continue reading "Thinking About NPR's Digital Future" >

By Kim Bryant

This post is the first in a series explaining the challenges we face in managing work requests, bug tracking and other operational processes. Specifically, I'll cover Jira, the tool that we selected to help with these challenges, as well as the ways we've configured it to suit our culture and needs.

Part of my job is figuring out how we can work more effectively, and one of the first areas we needed to tackle was our work request system. Our overarching goal when managing work requests is to allow Digital Media to easily separate the noise from the important stuff. You know that scene right after the crash in the first episode of Lost where Locke sees the equivalent of a redshirt wandering near an intermittently-spinning jet turbine, and the guy can't hear the specifics of Locke's yelled warning so he stops long enough to shout "What?!" and then fahWHOMP-- redshirt becomes strawberry jam and the engine explodes and a horrible situation just got worse? Here's a refresher:

We needed to stay off the path to experiencing our own redshirt schmear in the midst of premature labor, ineffective CPR, and lethal chunks of flaming metal shrapnel. Maybe ours wouldn't be as messy, but certainly no reprise of Beach Blanket Bingo.

Our ops demons and how we started taming them, after the jump.

Continue reading "Jira: 'Swapping Chaos for a Little Overhead' *" >

By Mark Stencel

Two of NPR's most ambitious multimedia projects -- "Planet Money" and "Climate Connections" -- collected prestigious awards for online journalism in the past week.

The Online News Association gave its annual award for topical reporting and blogging by a large news Web site to Planet Money. The Planet Money team was set up last year to produce a series of on-air and online reports, blog posts and podcasts that explained the global economy. No easy task -- especially given the international financial crisis that was unfolding as the project made its debut last fall.

"Planet Money provided a distinct value to a community of readers at a time when clear reporting on the financial crisis was just vital," the ONA judges said. "A lot of people were looking for and needed this information. The inaugural post that kicked off Planet Money was a feat of explanatory reporting. It stood out in an excellent field by the value it provided."

The ONA prize, announced late Saturday at the organization's Online Journalism Awards banquet in San Francisco, came days after NPR collected another significant honor -- this one from The National Academies here in Washington.

The National Academies is an influential scientific advisory organization comprising of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. It gave its 2009 Communication Award for Internet journalism to NPR's online components of Climate Connections, a yearlong series developed in partnership with National Geographic to explain "how we are shaping climate" and "how climate is shaping us" -- subjects of considerable complexity and controversy. The Academies' prize for online journalism is one of four it awards each year with support from the W.M. Keck Foundation to recognize "excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering, and medicine to the general public."

"Singly, these are significant honors for NPR," Ellen Weiss, senior vice president for news and information, said in an e-mail to our staff on Monday afternoon. "We were competing with the best in our field -- including the New York Times and Wired. The awards illustrate the growing seamlessness between NPR News on the air and online, and they are a testament to the journalistic importance and integrity of our presence in the digital space."

Planet Money and Climate Connections both represented major efforts to provide serious, in-depth reporting on complicated and important issues -- both online and on the air. All of us at NPR are thrilled for the staff who worked so hard on both of these projects.

Mark Stencel is managing editor for digital news at NPR.

By Andy Carvin

If you work at an NPR or PBS member station, you can now apply for a scholarship to attend PublicMediaCamp, scheduled for October 17-18 in Washington DC.

We expect to award no more than 10 scholarships. Each of the station scholarships will cover basic travel-related expenses to attend PublicMediaCamp, as well as a $2,000 stipend towards that same station hosting a local PublicMediaCamp. One application per station, please.

Scholarship Travel: Each station scholarship will cover basic travel-related reimbursements for one or two participants designated by the station to attend the PublicMediaCamp occurring in Washington DC Oct 17th and 18th. If sending two individuals to the unconference, one should be an employee of the station, but you have the option of having the second be a representative of a community organization that you will partner with to plan and host your local PublicMediaCamp. Such travel expenses may include: airfare, lodging, food and other expenses allowed by CPB travel guidelines.

Local Event Stipend: In accepting a scholarship, the recipient station also commits to hosting a local PublicMediaCamp before September 1, 2010. An additional $2,000 stipend will be given scholarship recipients to offset organizing and hosting that local PublicMediaCamp. Note: Scholarship recipients (and all interested stations) will receive detailed information, documented processes, and tools to aid in hosting such events.

Criteria: NPR and PBS will be selecting scholarship recipients -- pending CPB approval -- based on the applicant's experience with local community collaboration and ability to host a local PublicMediaCamp, and to create a balance of station market sizes and types (radio/TV).

Deadline: Applications will be accepted until 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 30, though will be considered on a rolling basis effective immediately. Please submit your information using this application form as soon as possible. Scholarship recipients will be notified immediately after being selected, and will be provided with information and process for booking and reimbursement of travel.

By Demian Perry, Robert Spier and Daniel Jacobson

The NPR News iPhone app launched on August 15 and the feedback has been tremendous! But we are not content to leave well-enough alone... Today, we launched our first upgrade to the app (version 1.1). Many of the changes in this version were implemented based on your feedback via the NPR Facebook page, Twitter, other posts on this blog, iTunes reviews, etc. We built this app for you, the users, so we took your comments to heart.

This release includes a lot of improvements. Most of these are "behind-the-scenes" changes to improve performance, minor layout issues and smaller feature enhancements. But there are some major additions as well, including:

Sharing Tools
With this release, you are now able to share stories via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. All three sharing functions are performed within the app itself, so you can continue to listen to the story while you share it.

Audio Controls
One of the most frequent comments about the app has been that there was no way to pause the audio and continue where you left off. This version adds the pause button to on-demand audio, such as programs and news segments. We also added "scrubbing", which allows you to fast-forward or rewind within either program- or story-audio segments.

Image Enlargement
For any story that contains a photo, we have added the ability to tap on the image to see a larger version of it.

Again, most of the changes for this are directly a result of your feedback. If you would like to see other features in the next version of the app, which we are already working on, please let us know. You can write us directly at techcenter at npr dot org, tweet us at NPRTechTeam or post comments to this blog.