Any recommendations or hints? Appreciate it!

I’m in the midst of developing a small news site — smaller, more intense audience than Quartz — and just about every decision I have made has been different from those of Quartz.

To begin at the technical level: the use of WordPress. When planning my site I considered WordPress, but I also considered open-source products such as Newscoop from SourceFabric. I discarded these, both because none of them really answered the actual needs of a news site, and because they all seem to be written in PHP , which I don’t regard as a suitable language to write complex web services in (vide Twitter).
Instead I looked at web frameworks such as Seaside (Smaltalk), Lift (Scala), Play (Scala) and Weblocks (Lisp). And the design pattern I chose to implement to deliver content relies mostly on the NakedObjects design pattern rather than MVC (model-view-controller). Essentially, objects that describe a site element (such as a news story) emit basic, standard html markup, but the view portion of the interface is handled mainly by CSS.

It’s evident to me why Quartz chose WordPress: they didn’t want to get too distracted by technical design issues. The problem with that approach is that you simply cannot separate the technical from other aspects of your site — it’s not like in print, where the press and paper you use is all but irrelevant to content.

Equally, while I can appreciate that the idea of “obsessions” is slightly better than that of “beats”, they are both flawed. Their flaw is that they deal with the way in which news is produced, rather than the way it is consumed. The question really is: whose obsessions are these? The suggestion is that an “obsession” is something genuinely shared, certainly more than a “beat” may be. But I doubt that really is the case. How would you cover something like “Mobile Web” differently as an obsession than as a beat?

What I think is a better approach is to see news as largely deriving from entities and their interactions. “Mobile Web” today means less than Amazon, Google, Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Startup XYZ. Covering those as beats or obsessions would not work, either. But you could have users express interest in these, and then derive news for them based on that interest.

I’m not saying that Quartz is “bad”, but I am saying it belongs more to the category of “more of the same” than “significantly different”. Which is a shame.

I did click on one of the ads. This sent me to a page that told me I needed a newer version of Flash.

While I can live without knowing what I’m missing on the advertiser’s site, I do find the site’s Obsession Bar to be irksome. It is constantly re-sizing itself when I scroll down. I hate these bars on all websites as they both distract my reading and break the ability to use the space bar to work my way down the page. But since this one expands when you can see a posting’s headline and contracts when you can’t, it is far more intrusive.

My own principal attention will be piano, and it is our life style interest.

If you would like to know far more regarding piano traditions merely have a look at our web site.

Five items you want to know just before starting piano lessons.

If you want to learn piano qualifications merely go to see my website.

So they might be able to give adaptive content between devices but they don’t seem to understand how to structure their content to use the native capabilities that give adaptive content within a single device. Having these native capabilities unavailable was an extremely jarring and broken experience to me and I will not be visiting them again.