Over the past few months, the Postmedia Digital Innovation Team has been quite busy building a new framework for widget development.  Today I wanted to take some time to tell you about this project.

Project Timbit started back in July when we first started putting the team together.  Although some insiders knew of this new group, there hadn’t been any formal announcement yet and wouldn’t be for a number of weeks.  The intent was to have everything fully functional by September at which point we would start engaging the various newspapers across the chain and help them prototype new ideas.  So, I decided to take the summer to build, learn and prepare.

I threw some ideas together and quickly met with my boss, Peter de Groot (no relation ) and my colleague Tom McGreevy, Director of Professional Services, to present them with following objectives for Project Timbit.

• provide a simple and fast framework for other teams (in particular the Professional Services team) to rapidly build, test, deploy, and manage external widgets
• to prototype a new story page / widget that is light weight, fast, flexible, innovative, and tablet/mobile friendly
• to announce our presence to the community by contributing this prototype as open source under the MIT license

So here we are a couple of months later and we’re ready to announce to the world what we’ve come up with.  We are days away from completing this leg of the race, and I thought I’d tell you a little bit of what we’ve done.

First, we created a new widget framework called ‘Timbits‘ which should have a stable production release within a day or two.  This framework is build upon Node.js, Express, CoffeeScript, CoffeeKup and a bunch of other fanatic libraries built by the Node.js community.  We’ve also included a few libraries of our own, such as Pantry, kitkat, and connect-esi.   Over the course of the last week, we’ve presented the framework to the Professional Services team and they have been busy experimenting with developing widgets and helping us identify bugs and shortcomings.  This new framework comes with some really nice features such as automated help, testing, optional client side rendering, and project/code generation.

Second, we put together some sample widgets of our own to both prove the framework as well as show off some design concepts.  I’m a big believer in using a single page/template with HTML5 and unobtrusive CSS/JS to target multiple screens and devices at once and I wanted to show what can be done using that philosophy and our framework.  We chose to create a new prototype for a story widget as that is by far the most important across our network.  We then published those examples up to Joyent and Heroku, and you can see the results at http://timbits.no.de and http://timbits.herokuapp.com/ respectively.  All of the examples (should) work within a regular browser, tablet and smart phone and include support for orientation and photo swiping.  We’re also putting the finishing touches on a prototype home page which will capture all of these aspects as well.

I’m going to be posting again shortly about our Node.js experience itself and why we love it, but in the mean time I thought I’d point you to the keynote presentation I used to introduce Timbits to the rest of the team.  It’s already a couple of weeks old and somewhat out of date, but it does provide some additional insight that I think is worth a read.

At this time I want to send a huge thank-you to our supporters out there, but also specifically to my teammates.  When I first stared up this new Digital Innovation team at Postmedia, I had a couple of key pieces I wanted to have in play before we hit the ground running.  First and foremost I needed the right people, which thankfully I now have.  Keith Benedict, Stephen Veerman and Kevin Gamble are nothing short of spectacular and their work on this project was inspiring.  They each bring their own unique perspectives and skills that compliments the rest of team in a way that makes the whole thing very functional.  I can’t wait to build some amazing prototypes and solutions with them on this new platform.