About

The Seattle Times 2012 Election Guide was built to help readers get the most important news and information as they mark their ballots.

This is The Seattle Times' first digital offering that works fluidly on all devices, thanks to its responsive design.

Much of this information comes from the Washington Secretary of State's own voter guide.

How to use this app

You can generate a custom election guide from the homepage in one of two ways:

Type your address into the address box
Click the location icon to auto-detect your address

After you submit an address, you'll see a menu of races and ballot measures specific to your location. From there you can learn more about candidates and initiatives and see our most recent news stories related to that topic.

Don't want to submit your address? You can still learn more by browsing through a list of all races and ballot measures.

For those outside Washington

Here is an example of a personalized election guide, using the address of The Seattle Times.

The nitty gritty

This app is running on the Django framework and hosted on a Heroku instance. Your congressional and legislative districts are calculated using a Washington-specific version of Django Boundary Service.

Our flavor of boundary service is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance running Nginx, Memcached and Gunicorn. Our static files are served using Amazon S3.

The main app lives on a Heroku box (also running Memcached and Gunicorn).

We built a custom Django template tag to pull in RSS feeds from Wordpress, to be open-sourced soon.

We're using Tilemill for our map design, OpenStreetMap for the base and Leaflet for the browser interaction.

Talk to us

Have additional feedback, questions or suggestions? Shoot a note to webmaster@seattletimes.com.

Credits

Kevin Schaul

Dean Kramer

Lauren Rabaino

Albert McMurry