We're making a major upgrade today to all of NPR's slideshows. Our slideshows are now iOS-friendly and available in our API.

Previously, NPR.org slideshows played in Flash, which iPhones and iPads couldn't display. The lack of API distribution also made these slideshows unavailable to our mobile apps and member station sites. In late fall, we began to change our production. We created a new slideshow experience in our NPR Music live event pages, which included a new player and distribution process.

In today's move, we expand the use of that technology to all of NPR.org. We are upgrading more than 2,000 slideshows: those from news stories, music stories and our Picture Show blog.

These slideshows include more than 30,000 images. If you browse NPR.org on your iPad, you can now view all of these images, swipe between images and tap for captions. We've improved the slideshows' buttons and behaviors for a better experience — wherever you seeing them. We plan to display slideshows across many more NPR platforms in the future.

If you use the NPR API, you can access many of these images.

More than 13,000 images, including more than 3,000 NPR images, are available to local station sites immediately. NPR's Digital Services division, which works with local stations, already has NPR.org slideshows flowing into the Core Publisher platform and plans to optimize the experience further in the future.

For all API users, more than 8,000 images are now available.

To find details about using slideshows from the API, read the second half of this previous Inside NPR.org blog post, under "Collections." Every story that has a slideshow should have a collection marked as type "slideshow." An update to the earlier post is that the output is available in NPRML and now JSON.

Keep in mind NPR slideshows use images from a wide variety of sources, and we don't have rights to distribute all of our images. But we continue to work toward as much distribution as possible.

At NPR, we've always taken great pride in those "driveway moments" that listeners tell us about. You know, those occasions when you sit in your driveway with the car running for a few minutes, just so you can finish listening to the story or interview that captured your attention.

With NPR and local station streams available on virtually every mobile and tablet platform these days, those "driveway moments" can happen just about anywhere.

And today, there's another opportunity to explore NPR. We have teamed up with social news magazine Flipboard to make NPR available in its iPad and iPhone apps. Flipboard says it plans to be available on Android devices as well in the coming months.

On Flipboard, you can now get NPR's latest News, Business, Arts & Life and Music news and features, along with the remarkably intimate interviews from Terry Gross and Fresh Air. You can listen while you continue to 'flip' and read. To ensure NPR is always easily accessible in your Flipboard experience, simply tap the '+Add' button within the NPR sections. Then, every time you open the app, the latest content from NPR will be there.

NPR is part of the launch of Flipboard's new in-app audio player. Flipboard now includes content from Public Radio International (producers of programs such as This American Life and To The Point) and music sharing service Soundcloud.

Our partnership with Flipboard represents a commitment to be the leader in news and cultural coverage that touches the lives of Americans, no matter how they tune in. With that goal in mind, you can expect to see and hear programming from NPR and member stations continue to be available where and when it's convenient for you.

To get started, download NPR in Flipboard and let us know what you think.

When you visit the NPR.org home page today, you may see a set of local-news headlines from your NPR Member station. We're beginning a month-long experiment to gauge your interest in these headlines and explore how we might better connect you digitally to your local station.

Thirteen NPR Member stations are participating in this experiment: Michigan Radio, KPLU, KQED, KUT, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Boise State Public Radio, WBUR, WNYC, WAMU, WHYY, WFIU, KPCC, and North Country Public Radio. If you live or work in their areas, you're likely to see their headlines on our home page, just below our main national headlines.

This picture shows an example of what you may see. NPR Digital Services, which works closely with Member stations, has posted an in-depth account of the experiment here.

At the end of the experiment, we'll evaluate your responses and determine how to move ahead. In the meantime, you can let us know what you think through the Inside NPR.org contact form.

Update on April 19: We've hit the end of our one-month test and have removed the local-headlines experiment from the NPR.org homepage. Thank you to every one of our viewers who clicked and gave feedback. Next, we're going to review the results of the experiment (both nationally and locally), see which parts worked and which parts didn't, and decide how to move ahead.

NPR's newly issued and updated ethics guidelines have a lot to say about being a journalist in the era of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and any number of other social media channels that our staff uses every day.

But less seems to have changed over the past couple of decades than you might expect. National correspondent Pam Fessler recently unearthed a one-page "netiquette" guide handed out to NPR staff in 1994, when the company first offered most employees at-work Internet access. The handout appears to be from an hourlong introduction to this new communication tool called email.

The document lists nine common-sense tips, SUCH AS NOT TYPING IN UPPERCASE. A few other points that stand the test of time:

"Be brief."

"Be careful with humor and sarcasm."

"Don't overreact to spelling errors."

The most relevant items in the 1994 guide, especially for employees at a national news organization like this one, are the first two on the page:

"Be careful what you say."

"Your message reflects upon you and NPR."

Those clear simple statements come remarkably close to summarizing what we advised our staff 15 years later, in 2009, when NPR issued its first guidelines for another new form of digital communication — social media. And the two-part message in both documents echo throughout the updated guidelines that NPR just released: Take advantage of these powerful resources to do your work, but don't forget that you represent our organization, especially if you are an editorial employee.

Sharing and social media have become deeply embedded in how NPR does business. These channels are among the ways our journalists cover their beats, cultivate sources and communicate with listeners and readers. They are vital listening posts that help us monitor events around the globe — from Haiti to Homs. Social media conveys our news coverage and our cultural coverage and helps promote our work and our mission. And, most recently, social media has become a recruiting tool for new employees — for us as well as other friends across public media.

In fact, social media is now fully woven into our new ethics guidelines precisely because it is so woven into how NPR operates and communicates, both as a newsroom and as a media company. (You also can read a summary and standalone compilation of the guidelines that specifically relate to social media, if that's the part that's most of interest.)

We tried to avoid being overly prescriptive about disclaimers or RT'ing policies for Twitter and the like. Instead we trust our journalists to be journalists, and to identify themselves as such when they use social media for reporting purposes. And we emphasize that our guidelines are a "living document," intended to evolve along with the technology. And the technology has already evolved quickly.

The overall message to our editorial staff is unchanged: Social media services offer powerful ways to do our work and extend the reach of our journalism. As in all aspects of our lives, we need to conduct ourselves online as journalists and remember that what we say and how we act will reflect on NPR.

Oh, and be brief, be careful with humor and sarcasm and don't overreact to spelling errorrs.

Mark Stencel is NPR's managing editor for digital news. He welcomes your feedback in the comments with this article or on Twitter: @markstencel

Today we are excited to announce the launch of NPR Music for iPad, a multimedia music magazine we hope will delight music lovers of all tastes and styles. The app is designed to showcase the best music content from NPR and NPR stations. This includes live concerts, exclusive first listens, original reporting and commentary. It also features quick access to over 100 NPR station streams through a persistent radio feature. The app takes advantage of the rich visual interface and tactile navigation of the iPad to present an integrated blend of text, images, audio and video.

Users of the existing NPR News app for iPad and NPR Music app for iPhone will notice some familiar conventions, as well as a variety of new features. These include favorites and a smart, graphical playlist.

Favorites and the playlist complement each other: favorites (represented by the traditional heart symbol) are for storing station streams and stories or songs you may want to quickly return to again and again; the playlist is your listening queue, which you can now see and interact with intuitively by swiping items into and out of the queue. You can also reorder them by dragging items from one spot to another with the "sticky" bar at the top of each tile.

To help users get the most from NPR's rich archive of content, the app will surface stories we think you'll like. In the right column on story pages we'll show you other stories you might want to see based on the one you're already looking at. Just below the playlist, the app will offer you stories you may like based, in part, on the items you have in your iPad iTunes library (see image above).

NPR stations have some of the best music content available anywhere and one of the app's greatest strengths is its expanded stations section. It's simple to locate stations you already enjoy and add them to your favorites list. Users can also easily find new stations to try based on genre, or via a featured stations section near the top.

NPR Music for iPad is part of our larger effort to deliver NPR Music's amazing — and often exclusive — content to users as widely as possible. We recently launched a browser-based live events platform for music that invites users to watch a live performance and participate in a simultaneous live chat that works on mobile, tablet and web browsers (including Android). We universally include some music content in our news products as well, such as the NPR mobile web site and NPR News Android app.

A great opportunity to try the new app's live video streaming capability will be on March 7 at 10 p.m. ET, when The Shins play live their forthcoming album Port of Morrow in New York at an event celebrating the album release and the launch of NPR Music for iPad. The app will also feature extensive coverage later in March from Austin's SXSW music festival. The app is AirPlay enabled so you can watch any of the videos on a bigger screen if you have an Apple TV.

We hope you enjoy the app. You can download it directly from iTunes here.

As the Republican presidential contenders make their final pitches to voters in Iowa, we hope you'll watch some of their speeches enhanced with our new, "Pop-Up Politics" treatment.

Just as VH1 used pop-up bubbles to give music videos another dimension, we're using bubbles — and sounds and animation — to give you a more contextual look at the messages being delivered to GOP voters.

The video animation project got started here at NPR after digital editors became fans of the pop-up series I did while at The Texas Tribune, an online startup in Austin. Before the 2009 launch of the Tribune, newly-hired reporters were asked to come up with a list of story ideas, and one of my ideas was not a "story" at all.

A month later, with the help of photographer Justin Dehn and animator Todd Wiseman, both of whom remain multimedia ninjas at the Tribune today, we debuted Texas stump speeches, interrupted by dozens of bubbles.

Digital Managing Editor Mark Stencel explained his reaction from here in D.C.: "As soon as I saw what you did in Texas I wanted to do a version for the presidential campaign — the perfect way to give people a chance to both hear from the candidates at length while also providing some context on the substance, the rhetoric and the stagecraft."

 

So we owe a hat tip to my former boss, the Tribune's Editor-in-Chief Evan Smith, who didn't love my first attempt at this non-traditional storytelling but embraced it anyway, gave it a platform, and supported it through a series of four animated speeches so the idea could catch on and be adapted by other newsrooms.

And adapted it, we did. The NPR designer-animators who worked on these, Nelson Hsu and Stephanie d'Otreppe, gave the videos their own, custom presentation so you can easily jump from video to video, and we have added yet another layer of context by having sources and more reading for various bubbles cycle underneath the videos as they are playing.

Further, we've made several considerations about how you are viewing the animation series, and on what devices. Given all the mobile devices and browsers out there, the team did a lot of work to simply make these available from wherever and whatever you're watching.

More videos are coming. When we were wrapping up the shooting phase of the project in mid-December, Newt Gingrich remained in the top tier of Iowa candidates. But in this volatile race, fortunes change faster than you can say Freddie Mac. So other candidates are in the works, and once there's a nominee, we'll be doing Pop-Up Politics for the general election campaign. Expect President Obama to get the pop-up treatment just like the other candidates.

Finally, the end credits on these videos don't include all the folks who played a part in making Pop-Up Politics possible. So a huge thanks to JoElla Straley for her research work, Adam Martin, whose tech skills are the reason the videos can be seen on mobile devices, and our team of editors — Debra Rosenberg, Erica Ryan, Greg Henderson and Keith Jenkins, who helped shepherd this project to launch.

Elise Hu is the digital editor of NPR's StateImpact effort, which focuses on government reporting in the states. Read more about it.

A week ago we launched an experiment in personalized listening we've dubbed the Infinite Player. The idea was to create a continuous listening experience similar to radio that also takes into account users' individual tastes.

The audience response has far surpassed anything we'd hoped for and we'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to try it out. We are grateful for your feedback. We've heard from people on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and through the contact form on the player itself. It's even received a little press from Read Write Web and the Nieman Journalism Lab.

While the player is experimental — and still a little buggy — testers' responses have been overwhelmingly positive on the overall direction and experience. We were not sure how the public radio audience would respond to something like this; you've convinced us it is clearly worth developing further.

While we look into next steps for extending the player, here are notes on a few specific questions raised in the initial wave of feedback.

Many people have pointed out a bug in Google Chrome that stops the player from advancing to the next story. For anyone using Chrome, you'll have much better luck if you use the player in its own browser window. The problem occurs when the player is in a tab that's in the background. While we don't yet know the cause, we will try to fix this issue in a future version.

There have been many requests to make the player work in other browsers — particularly Firefox and IE — and to offer a mobile version. The reason it's out first in Chrome and Safari is because both of those browsers have native multimedia support that made it possible to build the player quickly. We'd like to expand the list of supported browsers going forward, including mobile browsers (which doesn't preclude the possibility of an app at some point). The player, unfortunately, does not currently work on mobile Safari (iPhone and iPad). We have had some luck getting it to work on a few Android devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S II. If you're an Android user you may want to gamble and try it to out.

Some people have expressed concern about the thumbs up / down buttons. The fear is that use of the buttons will so narrow the pool of stories that it will seriously degrade the experience, preventing important news stories, or stories outside a certain range of topics, from appearing in the player.

We've actually worked very hard to prevent this from happening. What we're ultimately going for is an experience that keeps users informed and surfaces stories that are fun to hear based on individual preferences, while also leaving room for serendipitous discovery. You always hear the newscast first, and it repeats hourly (same as on the radio). The stories that follow are influenced heavily by both your ratings and the judgement of editors at NPR. Use of the buttons will improve the player's ability to suggest stories you'll like, without creating an echo chamber.

As we continue working to refine the player, we will take into account the many feature enhancements users have suggested. Some of the most requested so far are social media sharing tools, volume control and access to listening history. We are also working with NPR stations to create more localized versions of the player. We currently have KQED, KPLU, Michigan Radio. In the near future we are hoping to add KPCC, KPBS, OPB and the Northwest News Network.

Thanks again for the the invaluable feedback. Please keep it coming!

The NPR product team talks a lot about two ways people interact with audio: engaged listening and distracted listening. Engaged listening would be something like this:

There's listening and really not much of anything else going on (except perhaps looking for other things to listen to every now and then). We believe we've done a pretty solid job capturing this use case in our digital products. If finding and listening to audio is first and foremost in your mind, we offer tons of podcasts and program audio clips. You can queue these stories up on a playlist to run consecutively, or just hunt around individually to find the ones you want. You can even sync your playlist across browsers. All this requires a lot of the user's attention.

That model works very well for some people in some cases; but it's a far cry from the roots of radio in which the listener simply hits a button and listens. We've been referring to this second mode as distracted listening. Audio is playing in the background. You may be listening quite intently. But you're also doing other things, like driving, or the dishes.

The explosion of Internet-connected devices has created listening opportunities almost everywhere. Phones, tablets, computers, home stereos, car stereos, and TVs can all now connect to the Internet, vastly expanding the ways people find and listen to audio. Many of these new use cases lend themselves particularly well, if not exclusively, to this distracted listening model.

NPR and its member stations already offer some great options for this use case. The radio, of course, is the most obvious. NPR station streams are also available on desktop and mobile devices. But new platforms have created an opportunity to explore completely different approaches to distracted listening.

Today we are launching (in beta) an experiment we're calling the Infinite Player (works in recent versions of Safari and Chrome; registration required).

It's dead simple: you press a button and it plays. First you hear the latest NPR newscast. That's followed by stories we think you'll like from NPR's three main focus areas, news, arts and life, and music. The only controls are skip, pause and 30-second rewind.

We're calling it the Infinite Player because it will continue playing stories until you turn it off, just like the radio.

Taking a cue from popular products already using personalization (think Facebook, Zite, Flipboard, Pandora, YouTube's LeanBack), the player allows you to indicate whether you're interested in a particular story or not. If you are, we'll try to give you similar stories. If you're not, we'll do our best to find others you'll enjoy. The player should deliver the type of serendipitous experience you expect from NPR, with recommendations based on your input, NPR editors' judgment and story popularity.

The real value of the NPR experience is the local / national partnership with member stations. We are working with NPR Digital Services and a number of stations to release versions of the player that combine both local and NPR audio into a seamless experience. You can try out three of them here: KQED, Michigan Radio and KPLU.

Please keep in mind that the Infinite Player is an experiment. And it's in beta — at this time the player only works in Safari or Chrome (works best on Chrome in its own window). We'd love to hear your feedback on the experience, the content, the technology and anything else you want to share with us about the Infinite Player. Enjoy!

Inspired by old-school skunkworks, Google's 20-percent-time policy and, most directly, RSA's animation of a talk by Dan Pink about employee motivation, NPR Digital Media staff members recently jumped into Serendipity Days for the second time.

The goal of the Serendipity exercise is to "tap the creative ideas of the overall team and create a vehicle for getting small, cool projects/research explored." Put another way, we sought the quality of serendipity: "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident."

Our first sessions took place in May; with a few logistical issues smoothed out and even broader participation, we met again in the last days of September.

The rules are Outback Steakhouse simple: take one-and-a-half-working days to investigate whatever you feel like investigating. You may work alone, or in a small team. Give a three-minute presentation on what you found, and leave a link in the wiki to any artifacts: design comps, wireframes, functioning software prototypes. Can't get something to work? That's good, too: fail fast.

 

Were we motivated? Youbetcha! At least one colleague took his project home with him and had his prototype running by the next morning.

Come presentation time, many of us had difficulty condensing findings into a three-minute talk. A handy countdown timer kept us on schedule. Presentations themselves included working code, videos, flow charts, HTML with CSS, tables of data and photos of whiteboards(!).

In the demo/presentation sessions from May and September, several themes emerged. These ranged from professional development to interest in new technologies, like the MongoDB database, a popular entry in the NoSQL sweepstakes.

Another theme that emerged was exploring new ways to respond more nimbly to fast-moving news events with liveblogging tools and new approaches to presenting breaking news. Several people presented ideas to improve the quality and reliability of the tools that NPR uses to produce digital content: turbocharged automated tests, a revision control system for stories and a better way to manage the multitude of pieces that appear on the home page.

A sample of other ideas explored include:

• Proposed enhancements to music events like our Tiny Desk Concerts
• Techniques to make Web pages load in the browser faster
• Ways to deepen NPR's relationship with the audience and community, enabling listeners to tell their own stories
• New training material for our own staff to use
• Prototyping a reduced-clutter experience for financial supporters of member stations

Again, on the technical and software development side, there was a lot of interest in growing the linkages between the information embedded in NPR's digital content (and social media presence) and the larger digital world.

We pushed toward both ends of the structured/unstructured data axis. On the structured end, team members researched Linked Data and the Resource Description Framework. On the other end, our colleagues mined data from Twitter feeds, for instance, plotting NPR mentions across the planet on a world map. As software developers, this is really energizing — this is right in our team's wheelhouse.

Even more exciting (and a little bit mystifying, since not all of us are designers) were two presentations that involved responsive web design. Mobile and other portable devices continue to explode the received wisdom about page dimensions, and it's critical for us to keep up.

And, yes, there were some failures. More than once we heard, "this tool really doesn't work," or, "I was too ambitious and didn't accomplish what I had hoped." September's session introduced a special recognition for these pioneers, the Penguin award, (a concept from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture) named to honor the bold first bird in the flock who jumps off the ice floe (knowing that he risks being eaten by a leopard seal).

The last event in our 48-hour festival of creative mayhem is a brief retrospective: What worked well? What worked not so well? Retrospectives are a technique we depend on to keep our development process agile, to make sure that all the instruments in our toolbox remain sharp until we use them the next time.

Some of May's innovations are already being incorporated into active development projects. Late Friday afternoon, yet another Serendipity Days project was being demonstrated for an editor. It's likely to appear on NPR.org in the near future.

NPR has launched a new app for the Google TV platform. The app — featured in the Google TV Spotlight Gallery (video only works in Chrome) — makes it easy for users to watch NPR's best video and multimedia slideshows on a big screen.

We've made great strides in the past few years expanding our ability to tell compelling multimedia stories. NPR now has an award-winning team of visual journalists in-house. Their work spans all genres — from hard news, to music, to food. NPR.org even has a photo blog, the Picture Show, and, earlier this month, NPR Music won an Emmy for a video feature called Project Song.

Naturally, the NPR app on Google TV contains videos from NPR Music and its station partners, including Tiny Desk Concerts, studio sessions and live concerts. It also has a selection we're calling "Radio Pictures." Covering a variety of topics, it contains videos, audio slideshows and even a few animated reports.

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts, Google TV provides helpful templates for quickly creating a channel. For our app, NPR's design and user experience folks heavily customized the look and feel of the channel. Our development team coded all the necessary CSS and powered the app with calls from the NPR API.

It's new territory for us and we'd love to hear what you think about the app. Pass along any comments — positive or otherwise — you might have to our product team via our contact form.

Every day NPR sends hundreds of stories out to the Internet and millions of users. They read, listen to, comment on, and share those stories on NPR.org, and on partner sites that ingest our content via our APIs. Every day there are also behind-the-scenes system hiccups, publishing blips, and technical potholes that we fix before they can turn into site-eating sinkholes.

If the release of new code is the grinning pixie madly waving her shiny pom-poms at the pinnacle of a human pyramid, production support is the dependable, strong-backed, even-tempered folks who make up the base. Without them, the pixie wouldn't have a prayer of getting up there.

In this post, we'll give you an overview of our production-support process, some recent changes and plans to make it stronger.

Where Are The Errors Coming From?

• Seamus: NPR's content management system. Our writers, editors and producers use Seamus to build stories and blog posts, input rundowns and send out breaking news emails.
• API interface: Essentially provides a structured way for other computer applications to get NPR stories in a predictable, flexible and powerful way.
• Web pages: NPR public Web pages showing NPR stories, series, topics, programs and music events.
• Scripts: Run automatically by back-end systems on a predetermined schedule, or run manually as needed.

Who Asks The Tech Team For Support?

• Inside users: NPR staff who can build a story or blog post in Seamus and publish to the NPR web site and API interface.
• Outside users: Includes Web site visitors who can access the NPR web site and the API interface. NPR's User Care team handles the majority of problems these users have, but they send us the odd or hard-to-solve issues.
• Invisible users: NPR's system-scheduled tasks. If a task fails, an email reporting the failure is automatically sent to the tech team.

Current Production Support Model

Generally speaking, users ask for production support via email. When a user encounters an issue in the system, they send an email to a specific email address to ask for help. At least one developer is assigned to monitor and respond to these emails. This production support person usually responds to an email within 10-30 minutes and often solves the problem the same day. If it's a bigger, more complicated issue, the developer working on production support asks the user to file a ticket in Jira so the fix can be prioritized and scheduled for an upcoming release.

If something is really wrong – like npr.org slowing to a crawl or crashing – we usually know and respond within a couple minutes. NPR staff bombard the support email address, call development team managers, and sometimes even jog over to our desks to warn us. In this kind of production emergency, one of the Digital Media managers will make sure the correct people are working on the problem and send out status emails to the Digital Media team every 10 or 15 minutes until the problem is fixed.

The tech team isn't large enough to match the almost-around-the-clock staffing of the editorial team. For emergency help during hours when the tech team isn't working, an editor can call a support line staffed 24/7 by NPR's IT staff, who use a table of problem scenarios to determine the next steps. For example, if a user can't log in to Seamus, a system administrator gets a call. If it's a publishing error on a breaking news story, IT reaches out to the developer on call.

In addition to reacting to support requests from our users, we also have a variety of system monitors and dashboards that alert us to issues as they arise (or just before they do) well before we get any reports from outside of the team. Our system administrators use several different monitoring packages that give us insight into system health of our Web servers, databases, and our API.

Future Production Support Model

Recently, we started using Splunk to index our log messages and help us search and analyze our systems. We're now catching a lot of issues before they become widespread, critical problems, just by regularly looking at reports each day on the Splunk dashboard. Following every release we look at the responsiveness of our systems using Splunk to be sure it's in line with the baseline established before the release. We'll also try to note any patterns forming around warnings and errors that may be a result of code in the release and address them before they become problematic.

We're slowly shifting from a reactive, user-driven error-reporting model to proactive, system-driven maintenance checks. System stability will become increasingly important as NPR moves to more robust, round-the-clock reporting. Our goal is to reduce the number of live errors to miniscule levels and for editors to use the support email address less and less over time. There will always be behind-the-scenes system hiccups and publishing blips, but in the future we hope to fix more of them before the editors ever see the problem.

If you've ever wanted to connect your iPhone, iPod or iPad to the audiophile heaven that is your living room without cords or adapters, then it's time to get excited.

With the release of iOS 4.3 on Apple's mobile offerings, you can stream media content from apps on your iDevice to any setup hooked into a WiFi-enabled Apple TV. Both the NPR News and NPR Music iPhone apps will have this capability, as will as NPR for iPad.

But enough hype. How do you get Robert Siegel's voice of rich mahogany into your speakers? Let's walk through it. And don't panic; it's actually quite easy.

Before we can get to the good stuff, you will need to update both your mobile device and your Apple TV with the latest software. Once you've updated to iOS 4.3 and Apple TV software version 3, connect both devices to the same wireless network. You will need the latest version of your NPR app, as well.

With all the new software in place, you are ready to embark on your new Airplay-enabled NPR experience.

Turn on your TV and select the appropriate input for the Apple TV. While that is loading, launch the NPR app of choice on your iPhone or iPad and select a story to hear. As the piece begins to play, you should see the familiar audio controls appear with an additional button - It's a white rectangle and a triangle, which together look sort of like a TV - this is the Airplay icon. If your Apple TV has finished booting up, tap the Airplay icon. You should be prompted with a dialogue box. Select Apple TV to begin streaming NPR from your iDevice.

Sit back and enjoy.

You should hear the story start to play almost instantly over the speakers connected to the Apple TV. The Airplay icon in the NPR app will be highlighted blue. While active, you're small screen will function kind of like a remote control. To disconnect, simply tap the button, and when prompted with the dialogue box again, select your device instead of the TV.

As of right now, Airplay video won't work in NPR apps. But expect to see an update enabling this feature soon.

Need more info? Visit our mobile page or you can learn more about iOS 4.3 from Apple.

We're happy to announce NPR News for Android 2.0 is live in the Android Market.

Last summer, we submitted designs to the open source community to discuss how to best move forward with the app. Listening to feedback from our users, we've added favorite stations, more programs with live streams, and an overhauled player. A retooled interface brings more universal navigation, slicker interactions, and revamped graphics.

The overhaul took longer than we expected to get off the ground. But now it's here, we think you'll like it.

For those of you more technically inclined, we are still working on getting the source back into the repositories of the original code site. Some complicating factors have temporarily prevented us from doing so. But be assured the code will be available in the near future and the project will remain open source.

Tell us what you think. Feedback from the people who use the app is the catalyst for moving us forward. Find us on Twitter @nprandroid or send an email to npr-android@googlegroups.com.

A lot of work has been going on recently under the hood of NPR's API. A quirk of the versioning system we use for the API is that only the native format, NPRML, has our version attached. One reason for that is that many formats, such as RSS, have a "version" already specified for them, while NPRML was originally derived from an internal XML-based format NPR uses. We've made some fairly major changes recently. Even though the bulk of them are not very visible to the outside world, they seem to warrant at least a small version bump, and so we rolled out NPRML 0.94 on Wednesday the 16th of February, 2011.

We've been calling this the "API Refactor," though it's more extensive than changes for which the term refactor is usually used, and wasn't prompted by any major problem with the running system, but by the knowledge that major changes will be needed as we expand usage of the API.

 

Rationale

When an API request comes in, one of the request parameters is the output type, which can be NPRML, RSS, JSON, or one of several others. Prior to version 0.94, choosing a different output type resulted in a lot of work specific to that output type being done, and changes or upgrades could easily be (and sometimes were) accidentally applied only to one or some output types. In general, these output types are supposed to be different display formats for the same data, so this situation was suboptimal. It's also true that there are times when one output type really does need to have some specific difference from the other output types — other than, of course, the format itself — and so we still needed to be able to apply such differences where they were wanted.

Later this year, we expect to have a lot more API Ingest activity, with many public radio stations adding their own content to our system. Since various legal requirements exist regarding the rights to some of this content, we needed to have a more flexible rights management system, so that stations can control which resources are available through the API and to whom. Previously, we'd only needed a simpler system in which we could just add business rules directly if needed, so thinking about the requirements for this wider availability helped us flesh out the design for the new systems we're building.

Lastly, our original design had been to add all the information about all the resources we had associated with a request, and then pare away the parts which weren't relevant or were restricted by rights considerations, and add metadata based on the document itself to the document (some of our metrics information, for example). We did this by building an XML document containing all possible results and then using XPath, an XML querying method, to find, alter, and sometimes remove information. We called this layer the "Transform" layer. This worked quite well for most requests, but had some difficulties as well: when we wanted to add a new tag, it was necessary to ensure it didn't collide with XPath queries we were already using; when we wanted to remove some information from the initial superdocument, it was very difficult to be certain it wasn't being used by some XPath query in one or more Transforms. Some of this we had already solved by having extensive tests run throughout each release to make sure we were still getting the expected data (and sometimes not getting extraneous data) after each change. However, there was always the risk that a change would be made which wasn't covered by our existing tests.

So, we wanted the API refactor to make it

• easy to make changes that apply to the results without regard to the output type;
• easy to also make changes that apply only to a specific output type;
• possible for a given API Ingest user to have their own set of rights-handling rules, so that they can use the API to distribute their content without undue concern;
• easier to make changes and additions to formats (especially our native format, NPRML) without worry that we're exposing too much or not enough data for a given request.

How things were

As mentioned above, our system used to build a document which contained all possible information we might return from this request. This document, which was a superset of NPRML, might then be run through the transformation layer to produce NPRML output, or it might be used to construct some very different output, like RSS or HTML, which would then be run through the transforms. The work of building the XML was done in classes we called Views (though, for those familiar with the MVC paradigm, they subsumed both the View and most of the Controller aspect). Views did much of the work of building the XML and held much of the implementation of various output rules. When adding a new behavior, it was quite often unclear whether it should go in the appropriate View(s) or in the transformation layer, or both. It was common, for example, to add flags to the data in a View, and then use them to do other work in a Transform, and remove the flags in a different Transform that ran later.

In general, an API call went like this, neglecting our caching:

1. Receive request
2. Find and sort stories, applying some business rules
3. Build superset document in XML of all story data found, applying some business rule
4. Slice and dice this superset to eliminate or add data per business rules

How things are

Now, our API call looks more like this:

1. Receive request
2. Apply business rules to request via rules system
3. Find and sort stories
4. Build story models
5. Apply business rules to model via rules system
6. Build outgoing XML

In some cases, the final output isn't XML, and in that case there's a conversion step after the above.

While the main motivation for this work was to more easily support upcoming changes, we had two speed-related expectations. First, we believe that speed improvements, like our other improvements, can be more easily made. Second, we thought there might be some improvement in responsiveness without specific attention to that, just through not traversing a gigantic XML document repeatedly to implement business rules. This turned out to be true, in that we've seen some speed improvements since the API refactor went live on api.npr.org: our average response time has dropped from above 0.45 seconds to about 0.35 seconds, a better than 20% speed increase.

How things will be

The work we did over the winter on this refactor will continue to pay off, but we have about as much left to do as we've done — the only part of the API we changed was the Story API, which serves up, as the name implies, stories. The other API types, such as lists of topics, artists, and other types, and such as the Player API that supports the NPR multimedia player, are yet to be converted to the new API system.

In future months, we plan to finish converting the rest of our API types, and we expect to continue reaping the benefits of this project for years to come.

Starting today users will notice a change to our commenting process designed to improve the quality of discussions on NPR.org. In an effort to decrease spam and encourage civility we will more aggressively moderate the user comments that appear on the site.

The community on NPR.org is 450,000 strong with members from around the world. Comments add perspectives and expertise that enhance the value of our news coverage to other users, and they've even helped us with our reporting on many occasions – your experiences and expertise have been invaluable to us. You have also told us that you value the civil conversation that you can have on NPR.org - and we want to make our community even better at encouraging that goal.

 

Unfortunately, we've recently observed a significant increase in the amount of spam in the comments as well as comments from some individuals who participate simply to anger or insult other community members. While we still rely (almost exclusively) on community members to report these violations of the NPR Community rules, a few months ago we brought on a team of community managers to help enforce the NPR Community Discussion Rules as well. This has improved the situation significantly, but it hasn't yet gotten the community to that goal of the civil discussion that you value. Balancing the desire to encourage free and open discussion and the need to prevent spam and harmful comments, we believe we've come up with a compromise that will be satisfactory to most of our members.

Starting today, all new users to the site will go through a period in which all of their comments are reviewed by a community manager prior to the comments appearing on the site. We expect this review to take fewer than 15 minutes for each comment. Once a user has established a reputation for following the commenting guidelines all of his* comments will appear immediately after posting. Community managers will only review comments in response to a specific report from other community members.

To incorporate our existing active users into the new system, we've reviewed your commenting stats — more specifically, the percentage of comments you may have had blocked for violating the rules. The vast, vast majority of our community members have been model citizens, and nothing will change for you — your comments will be posted immediately. Our community manager will review the comments of a small number of current users — fewer than 2% of active users — who have demonstrated a history of breaking the discussion rules. Once these consistently adhere to the discussion rules, we'll stop reviewing their comments before they are posted.

We rely on our community members to help us meet the goal we all share - a safe place for civil discourse on the site. Please take a moment to review our discussion rules, even if you feel that you're familiar with them already, and click the "report abuse" button next to any comment you think breaks those rules. That'll help our community managers address issues as promptly as possible. We'll also continue to encourage NPR staff to participate in discussions, and our bloggers will still facilitate conversations just as they always have.

This isn't a decision we've taken lightly. We've spent many months discussing solutions internally, as well as collecting feedback from our users. Managing an online community is more art than science and we want to balance our desire to have an open community with our goal of promoting a civil conversation. If you have a question about a decision, or would like us to look at your account, please let us know.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, so please feel free to post a comment on what you think of the system. We'll be happy to answer your questions as well.

Thank you also for your commitment to a high quality of discussions here on NPR.org.

*See comment thread for his / her / theirs discussion. -KM