What’s Messi up to these days?

Streetfilms produces short films showing how smart transportation design and policy can result in better places to live, work and play.  Its goal is to inspire action and behavioral change to make the cities of the world more livable.

So how do we measure Streetfilms’ success at achieving this goal?  If we look at how people engage Streetfilms, we can draw a few rough categories of increasing degrees of user engagement:

Grazers

• watch a film, or part of a film
• read the accompanying write-up, transcript, subtitles, or comments on a film

• watch streetfilms on a regular basis
• subscribe to streetfilms updates in RSS, facebook, or twitter

• comment on films to discuss with other community members
• translate subtitles into different languages

• embed streetfilms in their own websites
• buy dvds of streetfilms and hold screenings in their community

1. Log in to Twitter and click on Resources in the right sidebar
2. Choose Widgets and then click “My Website”
3. Choose the Search widget or any other widget
4. Customize then embed!
5. You may want to add some css on the page to customize the look of the widget. I had to here because my styles were interfering with it a bit.
6. Edit the settings to set interval: 5000.  This will make the widget update every 5s instead of the default 30s.  You can also adjust the width and height.

I played around with biasing the Google search results by date.  This worked fine but, unfortunately, Google searches all site content, including sidebar content and category drop-down lists, when returning results.  So, if you searched for something like a category name, you would essentially end up with a list of all blog posts in reverse chronological order, which is quite useless.

What our editors really wanted was to be able to revert back to the original WordPress search which only searches blog post content.  So I spent some time integrating it with the Google Custom Search interface.  I ended up producing an almost exact replica of the styles and behavior used by Google.  I managed to pull in post thumbnails, to highlight the search term in results, etc.

So now we can search for “bike lanes” by date or by relevance and get useful results for both.  And for anyone else who wants to do this, here’s the code.

A few days ago I rolled out Google Custom Search on Streetsblog as an improvement from the default WordPress search.  It is a streamlined form of the Google search engine that integrates with our sites and displays results by relevance.  After I rolled it out, our editors immediately realized that they wanted to be able to see search results sorted by date as well as relevance.  So I set out to discover how to get Google Custom Search to sort by date.

It turns out that it wasn’t so hard.  I came across this thread explaining how to do it and modified the js code accordingly.  I then put an absolutely-positioned link on the search page:

The link toggles to “sort by relevance” when you are viewing results sorted by date.  Google estimates the date of a particular web page to the best of its ability using content on the page, its url and the first time it was crawled.  The search results appear to be “roughly” sorted by date.

Occasionally certain search results are listed higher than newer ones, perhaps when they are significantly more relevant.  For example, for the search on “bike lanes”, this post was listed above this post even though it was older than it, perhaps because it had 28 comments, much more than the 4 on the more recent post.

Still, hopefully this will meet the needs of our users and help them mine the thousands of posts on Streetsblog.

Each time I look into this problem, the landscape is different.  Different plugins are available and Google offers different ways to hook into its API.  This time I was pleased to find a perfect way to offer Google search results on our blogs.  Using Google Custom Search, I created a search engine for each of our sites that restricts its results to just those from the site.  I then customized its look and feel via css in the Streetsblog style sheet.

I ended up with a solution that integrates closely into our blogs:

There are a few tips I picked up to accomplish this.  First, I changed the way we title our Streetsblog posts.  We used to use this format:

Streetsblog New York City » Hummer Going the Way of the Dodo

but I changed it to this format:

Hummer Going the Way of the Dodo | Streetsblog New York City

This way, the title of the post will be less likely to get truncated in search results, not just on our sites but on all Google searches.

Another key feature I made use of is turning off the Google ads.  Google Custom Search allows you to turn off ads if your site represents an organization that is exempt from taxation under section 501(c)(3).  This is found under the “Business Settings” of the search engine.

I kept our regular search widget in the sidebar but made it disappear when on the search page, at which point it is redundant.

Finally, I integrated Google Custom Search with our Google Analytics account to start gathering statistics on search usage.  It will be interesting to see what we can learn from this data.

In stillness, mind and object merge in realization and go beyond enlightenment. Nevertheless, in the state of receptive samadhi, without disturbing its quality or moving a single particle you engage the vast buddha activity, the extremely profound and subtle buddha transformation.

I made this video using an iPod Touch and iMovie. The music is Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, sung by Anna Moffo, and Four Tet, She Moves She.

To accomplish this I started with the same related posts plugin we use on Streetsblog: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.  This is really an excellent plugin that crunches masses of data to come up with a useful list of related posts for any given post.  By default, it can show this list at the bottom of a post before the comments, or in a sidebar widget.  We soon decided that we didn’t like these options and instead crafted a widget that floated within the story itself.

I did this by searching for a “more” tag within the content of the post using the WordPress the_content filter.  If it exists, I inserted the widget there so it appears mid-way through the post.  If it doesn’t exist, then I float the box at the bottom of the post.

Occasionally, we have stories that are composed of images and videos such that the “Related Stories” box would not fit anywhere nicely.  In this case, I made an option to turn off the box entirely for that post:

Unfortunately to accomplish these modifications, I had to edit the plugin code directly. This will make upgrading more difficult. Perhaps the plugin author may want to incorporate some of my modifications into future releases of the plugin. For that reason, I point to the code.

The NYTimes has created a sophisticated tool called Emphasis to solve this problem.  If you go to a NYTimes news post and hit the Shift key twice, you’ll expose small paragraph links at the head of each paragraph.  You can fine-tune these links by selecting individual sentences within each paragraph.  The url will change to link directly to that sentence or paragraph:

Amazingly, the NYTimes has open-sourced the code for Emphasis.  I’d be happy to fit this code to our blogs if our editors feel it’ll be useful.  My only hesitation is that adding another js library to our sites would need a thorough round of testing to make sure that it is not conflicting with any of our other libraries.

In the meantime, the easiest way to link to a particular spot in one of our posts, is to edit that post and put an anchor tag at the place where you want to link to, such as this one:

<a name="plink"></a>

Then you can link to that spot on the page like this: http://url.to.page#plink.

Here’s an example of linking directly to the image of this post.  The text “plink” is arbitrary and can be set to anything.

It has also inspired several derivative works.  This is what makes the Internet fun!

Here’s a tumblog showing humorous and noteworthy bike share suggestions.  Feel free to post one on the site:

Smart programmers figured out that they could easily request a json formatted dump of our data to use for their own visualizations.  Here someone imported it into a Google Fusion table.

Here’s a really nice remapping of the data with points scaled in size relative to how many votes they received:

And this is just the beginning!