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. Continue reading →