The Jason Salas Experience

Jacob Kaplan-Moss of Django fame has a neato write-up on his blog about how 6News in Lawrence, Kansas generated their scrolling election results graphics for TV. We did something similar for integrating election data here at KUAM.com, just not with Python.

I ran a similar system of disparate devices calling a centralized tier of election data for my station's web site out here in Guam. Our big challenge is that we publish data multiplatform, exacerbated by the fact that in addition to being the main architect for all of our systems, I'm also co-anchor of our coverage and newscasts, so I can't be the guy to physically work on the systems.

Basically, I wrote a .NET sub-application that integrates with an Excel spreadsheet which holds vote tallies. These tallies are, sadly, faxed to us from the tabulation center, since our local election commission can't find a more automated way of distributing the data. I built a component that reads-in the information into a C# caching tier that does most of the math, sorting, numeric formatting, etc. and then writes an XML structure to disk. This XML is incorporated into various clients via a series of XSLT processes - our web site, our mobile framework, and our Pinnacle TV graphics system.

FXDeko software within Pinnacle reads the data from a URL and dynamically creates graphics based on templates. So while it's not as technically-impressive as 6News' system, it does work for us and lets us get results out in near-real time in a whole bunch of different platforms and formats.