The Christian Science Publishing Society handles all publishing operations for the Christian Science Church. It publishes several periodicals, including the Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper, as well as weekly and monthly magazines. The project involves digitizing all back issues of these publications by scanning and converting articles to XML format in order to make the entire archives available online through a new digital platform. The goals are to grant subscribers access to the content while also allowing free sharing and access to selected articles. The project will use an agile methodology with phases and sprints to develop the new system incrementally.

1. Published in 1885,
Shared on
Christian Science Publishing Society

3. About Blend

6. Christian Science Church
• Started with eZ via Christian Science
Monitor
• Replace 40 co-mingled WPMU sites,
Java/XML based CMS

7. Christian Science
Publishing Society
• Handles all publishing operations of
the church
• Christian Science Monitor
• Christian Science Journal
• Monthly publication
• First edition in 1883

8. Christian Science
Publishing Society
• Christian Science Sentinel
• Weekly Publication
• First edition in 1898
• Christian Science Herald
• 14 languages
• Various schedules
• First edition in 1903

9. Publishing Environment
Combined Print Magazine Sales 1991-2011
380,000,000
347,500,000
315,000,000
282,500,000
250,000,000
1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011
Total Unit Sales
Source: MPA, magazine.org

10. Value in Back Archives

11. Value in Back Archives

12. Value in Back Archives

13. Value in Back Archives

14. Project Overview

15. Project Overview
• Bring every article published in
these periodicals online.

16. Project Overview
• Bring every article published in
these periodicals online.
• Permissive business model to grant
subscribers access and allow for
content sharing and free content
selected by editors.

17. Project Overview
• Bring every article published in
these periodicals online.
• Permissive business model to grant
subscribers access and allow for
content sharing and free content
selected by editors.
• Deep search functionality to support
archivists as well as casual
searchers.

18. Methodology

19. Methodology
• All back issues destructively
scanned and OCR’d.
• Each article manually converted to
PRISM XML, OCR errors removed,
and marked up.
• eZ imports PRISM XML to digitally
re-assemble issues.
• Scans provided for access to
original content placement.

20. Features

21. Features

22. Features

23. Features

24. Features

25. Project
Management

26. Blend’s Approach

27. Blend’s Approach
• “Only work successful projects”

28. Blend’s Approach
• “Only work successful projects”
• Client selection

29. Blend’s Approach
• “Only work successful projects”
• Client selection
• Plan well, fail early (Agile)

30. Blend’s Approach
• “Only work successful projects”
• Client selection
• Plan well, fail early (Agile)
• Partnership and transparency

31. Agile as a Consultant

32. Agile as a Consultant
• Agile: “Keep iterating until it’s right”
• Consulting: “Tell me how much to
budget and when we’ll be done”

33. Agile as a Consultant
• Agile: “Keep iterating until it’s right”
• Consulting: “Tell me how much to
budget and when we’ll be done”
• Loads of discussion, not used much
in practice

34. Agile as a Consultant
• Agile: “Keep iterating until it’s right”
• Consulting: “Tell me how much to
budget and when we’ll be done”
• Loads of discussion, not used much
in practice
• Massive pressure to bill hours
instead of build process

35. Agile as a Consultant
• Agile: “Keep iterating until it’s right”
• Consulting: “Tell me how much to
budget and when we’ll be done”
• Loads of discussion, not used much
in practice
• Massive pressure to bill hours
instead of build process
• Payoff in the long run

36. Phases
• Project broken down in to
manageable major phases
• Each ~6 weeks - 6 months
• Worked as individual projects, with
eye towards dependencies
• Each phase launch-ready

37. Phases

38. Work Breakdown

39. Sprints
• Biweekly Deliverables
• Client involved in approval and
testing
• Meetings to demo deliverables

40. Instrumentation

41. Instrumentation
• Issue tracking

42. Instrumentation
• Issue tracking
• Burndown

43. Instrumentation
• Issue tracking
• Burndown
• Time tracking

44. Client Involvement
• Ideally, single point of contact to
serve as project manager
• Client involved with testing and
feedback
• Client directly participates in issue
tracker

45. Technical
Challenges

46. Scale

47. Scale

48. Dates
• eZ Date datatype: 1970
• Older PHP date functions: 1901 (32-
bit int)
• Communication with Solr for range
functions, etc.
• BlendArchiveDate: drop-in
replacement for eZDate

49. Porous Paywall

50. Porous Paywall

51. Porous Paywall

52. Porous Paywall

53. Porous Paywall

54. Static Assets
• 3TB of PDFs and JPG scans
• Never change
• Not indexed

55. Static Assets

56. Static Assets

57. Background Processing
Worker
Gearman
Daemon
Client

58. Background Processing

59. Background Processing

60. Background Processing

61. Cache
“There are only two hard
things in computer science:
cache invalidation, naming
things, and off-by-one
errors.”
-- Tim Bray

64. Cache Block Invalidation

65. Hosting Architecture

66. Questions?
Joe Kepley
Blend Interactive
http://blendinteractive.com
http://github.com/
blendinteractive
http://joind.in/7526
@joekepley