Here’s what’s in OpenBlock 1.0. Check the docs for more details.
Hyperlocalness
- News items database: each item has a date, location, and flexible metadata
- Templates for custom page layouts
- Serve hyperlocal news for multiple municipalities
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
Slice and dice your local news
- Email alerts
- Custom RSS feeds
- Browse news items by neighborhood, timeline, or type.
Get 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)
- Meetup scraper (under development)
- User-submitted content (under development)
Power an existing website with OpenBlock
- REST API, including spatial filters
- Widgets, customizable
- Widget maps (under development)
OpenBlock is 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
- Further Admin UI improvements (under development)
