
Rescue from Antarctica - cantlin
http://www.theguardian.com/science/antarctica-live/2014/feb/28/-sp-rescue-from-antarctica
======
cantlin
We've done much more impressive bespoke layouts than this in the past, but
this one was made 100% with native CMS entities. AMA.

~~~
grey-area
Interesting, and kudos on the Guardian redesign if you were involved - the
article pages are my favourite bit of the redesign. I would love to see this
sort of bespoke treatment on the home page, which is still a bit incoherent
and unfocussed. It'd be great to see a home page takeover for really important
stories which gave space to one particularly important story or shot for a
day, in the same way that paper newspapers sometimes used to allow the
takeover of their first page for important events.

Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which
supports this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS (above just
basic pages), what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are
only used on one page/section etc? Are you just working on some stories for
the Guardian team, or working full-time on Guardian stuff?

~~~
cantlin

      > Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports
      > this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS
    

The Content API [1] is the heart of the beast - it takes input from our
various content systems, including those involved in the production of the
paper, and makes it available to frontends in a simple shared format. The CMS
responsible for this piece treats content as an ordered list of entities of
various types (text, video, quote, etc.). The article leverages a new (to us)
pattern called layout hinting. Each entity is given a semantic value, like
"narrative" or "auxilliary" which describes its relation to overall story. The
rendered templates are then free to play with those however they choose.

    
    
      > what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on
      > one page/section etc?
    

I couldn't answer that one confidently, but you can always go and have a look
at the source [2].

    
    
      > Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time
      > on Guardian stuff?
    

I'm the product guy for content pages on the site [3].

\--

 _[1][http://guardian.github.io/content-api-
docs/index.html](http://guardian.github.io/content-api-docs/index.html)

[2]
[https://github.com/guardian/frontend](https://github.com/guardian/frontend)

[3] [http://gu.com/humans.txt](http://gu.com/humans.txt) _

~~~
grey-area
Really interesting, and thanks for the github links, I'll have a look - I had
no idea this stuff was open source.

------
lutusp
Quote: “But he couldn’t: there was too much ice closing in, like a big vice
[sic].”

I'm seeing much more of this class of error as the years go by, as people give
up on reading, then become overreliant on how words sound to choose the right
one.

A vice is a character flaw.

A vise is something that exerts a mechanical grip.

~~~
cantlin
Actually, the difference seems specific to US English. My OED includes _vise_
only as an alternative to vice, which carries both meanings. A quick Google
also turns up this [1] article, which claims (without citation) that "In the
U.S., the word for the clamping tool comprising two jaws closed and opened by
a screw or lever is spelled vise. Outside American English, the vise spelling
rarely appears. The gripping tool is instead spelled vice."

\--

[1] [http://grammarist.com/spelling/vice-
vise/](http://grammarist.com/spelling/vice-vise/)

~~~
lutusp
Okay, that's interesting. It seems that having two distinct words was an
example of pointless complexity for the modern reader, and compressing them
into one simplifies things for everyone. This reminds me of the fate of
"literally", which has come to mean (a) literally, and (b) figuratively.
Overall, a great simplification.

[http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_...](http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_literally_now_also_means_figuratively_newscred/)

~~~
weego
I would never have considered an English (in a geographic sense) journal of
any kind to use the spelling vise in this context.

Regards the other point if anything I would have said that was one of the
worst "evolutions" of our language in recent times.

