Tidepool News Service

The Tidepool News Service was a project devoloped for Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon. It was designed as a news clipping service for regional information in the Pacific Northwest and was one of the very first online news consolidation sites. Each morning an editor reviews dozens of news sites, mostly newspapers, and selects articles that might be of interest to readers. For each article the editor inputs a headline, link, and body text (usually the first paragraph). Then the editor assigns the article to categories and subjects (it may be, for instance, about salmon, and economics in British Columbia). All the articles are stored and searchable. Initially the site was built using ColdFusion and Microsoft Access, but over time the number of articles became large enough (more thank 30,000) that Access began to slow significantly, and the whole dataset was converted to MySql. I was lead developer for Tidepool.org from 1998-2004. At it's peak during that time tidepool had more then 70,000 articles and received several thousand unique visitors each day.

The three main sections of the the website were:

• Public Side -- This is where people could view clipped articles as well as articles written by tidepool staff. Similar to the model later used by news.google.com, one could view the top stories, and all the days articles, or one could select categories for viewing, such as 'Science', or 'Economy', or more specifically one could select subjects of interest such as 'transportation', 'wildlife', or 'Alaska.' In addition we made it possible to search, with a variety of constraints, the entire dataset of articles, and to send a link to any article as an email using a quick online form.
• Editor Side --- This is where all the articles were entered. Several modifications were made over the years so that editors could enter articles swiftly and accurately. Methods for annotating articles, as well as catogorizing, and flagging top articles were all created.
• Subscriber Side -- We also created a section where subscribers could receive regular emails of articles that might interest them. Subscribers could subscribe to clipped articles (top articles, or subject area articles) as a daily or weekly email, as well as original content.