Friday, September 18, 2009
Post Alert is a site-wide notification system that will deliver breaking news and special projects to Washington Post users. These targeted messages, selected by our editors, will inform you of the latest live videos, online discussions, breaking news and other special features.
To see an example click here and wait for about 10 seconds for the window to appear. Note, you will only see it once!
During development, this project was internally called, "Toast," because it came up from the bottom of your browser like a piece of toast coming out of a toaster. But we decided to change the name to Post Alert because it did not communicate what it was to the public. Internally, we still call it "Toast" and editors schedule new "slices."
Post Alert or Toast is presented using a light weight JavaScript. Jesse Foltz, the front-end developer originally wrote it using MooTools but had to re-write it using Prototype to avoid some conflicts throughout the site. We are using both versions on different pages across washingtonpost.com.
The data is passed to the JavaScript using JSON that is provided by a Django admin where editors can schedule and target Alerts to specific sections and subsections. All of the back-end work was build by Lee Trout using Python and Django.
We are also able to track the number of people who choose to opt-out as well as how many people click on the delivered content so we can see if the audience is really using the feature.
