For some time now I’ve been trying to teach myself how to program. I’m proficient in HTML and CSS, and and I could always tinker around the edges of PHP, but I really couldn’t code something from scratch to save my life. Well, there’s no better way to learn than by doing, at least when it comes to programming, so I gave myself a project to complete and, by golly, I did it. It’s called TechWire. It’s a tech policy news aggregator and I’m making it available on the web because I think it might be useful to other tech policy nerds.
Quite simply it’s a semi-curated reverse-chronological list of the most recent tech policy news with links to the original sources. And it’s not just news stories. You’ll also see opinion columns, posts from the various policy shops around town, new scholarly papers, and new books on tech policy. And you can also drill down into just one of these categories to see just the latest news, or just the latest opinions, or just the latest papers. Leave the page open in a tab and the site auto-refreshes as new items come in. Alternatively there is a Twitter feed at @TechWireFTW to get the latest.
Other features include the ability to look up the news for a particular day in the past, as well as clicking on a story to see what other stories are related. That’s especially useful if you want to see how different outlets are covering the same issue or if you want to see how an issue has developed over time. Just click on the linked timestamp at the end of a story to see related posts.
I hope TechWire (at http://techwireftw.com/) is as useful to you as it was fun for me to code. I’d like to thank some folks who really helped me along the way: Pete Snyder and Eli Dourado for putting up with my dumb questions, Cord Blomquist for great hosting and serene patience, Adam Thierer for being the best QA department I could wish for, and my wife Kathleen for putting up with me staring at the computer for hours.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.