KAFKA — is not only a novelist
About a year ago I started working on a spare project — a publishing toolkit for journalist across our network. Inspired by the family graveyard of a famous Czech novelist, located near our office, I called the project KAFKA.
KAFKA was designed to relieve pain for those, who tried to make their stories look better. For those, who can’t go deep into HTML to find an unclosed div-tag. Since the very beginning, it had to have clear interface, easy content embedding and a sense of control over your story. And it had to be totally free.
Zeros and ones
Technically it was simple: an instance on Digital Ocean for $10 per month, Python+Django on backend and React/Redux with Webpack on frontend. Nerdy Markdown is used for text formatting.
Initially, we used a preset HTML-template. Some time later the project migrated to a more flexible and typography-oriented own template.
Achievements
The project started as a drag-and-drop tool that allows to build a long-read in a matter of minutes. Later we added Quiz and Timeline builders.
Since the launch it has been already used by 10+ newsrooms across the whole network. More than 200 interactive articles were published online. Our creative colleagues are using KAFKA to create Timelines, Quizzes and beautiful Long-reads.
Today I finally finished building a beta of a Map builder focused on journalist needs. Next week it would be available for all users.
