At its core News Sauce is all about data, and as with any data-driven project the first step has to be getting to grips with what you have. It’s a process Tom Armitage very aptly described as “data exploration”. For the UK Government edition of News Sauce that meant very quickly pulling in as many government news feeds as we could to get a sense of the stream of information, and then soaking in it for a while.
It turned out that a great tool for doing that is Development Seed’s Managing News product. It’s a drupal distribution optimised for aggregating and visualising data from RSS feeds, and using it meant that we could be up and running in a couple of hours, and begin to see maps, graphs and other windows into the data we were gathering.
We were (and still are) so impressed with Managing News that we did consider simply using it as it was for the News Sauce platform. But as we began to consider features that would be useful, such as commenting, rating, and even simply being able to link to our representation of stories, we realised that that wasn’t going to work. So we built up from that prototype until we had something new.
The version you see now is actually still built on the foundations of that Managing News prototype. We’ve got a new version waiting in the wings that has been rebuilt (still on drupal) from the ground-up, giving us a much cleaner base for future development and making it easier for us to roll out future editions. If all goes well, you won’t notice when we switch over to the new version, but hopefully before long you’ll notice features we’ll be able to add as a result!