When I took over leadership of our newly created data team earlier this year, one of the first things I wanted to do was bring some sanity to how we build, deploy and host our news applications.

Before you read this, I encourage you to visit the thoughtful post by the Washington Post's Greg Linch on the same subject. It gets to the heart of an issue that, at least in my opinion, is going to be extremely important to the success of public service journalism – and particularly the non-profit variety – going forward.

Being the nerds we are here, we try to look at even our smaller projects as a chance to play around with new ideas. A small project that just ran over the holiday weekend gave us a great opportunity to do just that.

Wouldn't you know it, the nerds here at CIR this week actually managed to turn computer science into news.