Time Out
July 12th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Having just played around with Django for a couple of weeks last year, I can see what a huge missed opportunity Time Out was.
I worked there for 6 months in between UpMyStreet and 3RDsense. When I joined I really wanted to turn the site around – Time Out was a black and white listings site that was neither inspiring nor useful. We launched an online version of the Eating and Drinking Guide whilst I was there, so there were some successes, but having seen what Django offers, I can honestly say that we missed a trick.
Haivng dealt with all the content that Time Out produces I’m sure that just using Django would not solve all the problems. Getting all that data out of Quark templates was a huge, boring, fiddly job in itself. However, something like Django shows that you can abstract away a lot of the work. We could have created something similar, at least.
I’ve always had a huge sense of regret that I wasn’t able to achieve my goals whilst at Time Out, for a few key reasons. Most of all though, this IT Conversation recording with Rob Curley shows just how far behind online magazines and newspapers are in danger of falling. I’d love to see what Rob Curley could do with Time Out. Especially his fondness for those new technologies, like internology.