OpenBlock Feature List

Presentation of hyperlocal news

• News items database: each item has a date, location, and flexible metadata
• Templates for custom page layouts
• Serve hyperlocal news for multiple municipalities
• Browse news items by neighborhood, timeline, or type.

Put news on the map

• Geocode news items
• Present news by zipcode
• Present news by street and block
• Present news by neighborhood, or any other geography you choose
• Draw your own neighborhoods
• See news items clustered on a map
• Custom map icons for different news types
• Choose base map layers, including Google, Yahoo, CloudMade and others

For users

• Email alerts
• Custom RSS feeds

Getting data into OpenBlock

• REST API allows creating news via POST
• ... or write Python scraper scripts
• "Blob" scraper framework for PDFs, Excel files, etc
• Scraper daemon to run scrapers
• Flickr scraper (under development)
• Trulia scraper (under development)
• User-submitted content (under development)

Using OpenBlock to power an existing website

• REST API, including spatial filters
• Widgets, customizable
• Widget maps (under development)

Developer-friendly

• Built on Django
• uses South for database migrations
• Clone an Amazon EC2 AMI to get up-and-running in minutes (experimental)
• ... or install on hardware of your choice
• Amazing docs
• Safe upgrade