About ten years ago, while I was working at the washingtonpost.com sports department, a colleague and I were talking and decided to make a page about crime and sports. It is:
A roundup of stories involving athletes, coaches and fans who run afoul of the law, including updates on charges, trials, fines and investigations.
My boss, Bill Grant, approved, and decided to call it the Jurisprudence page. There was only one catch: We couldn’t spend any time updating it because we had better things to do, so I had to automate it using search logic.
When I originally made it, I had to program it so it fetched certain keywords so the article was about sports (which are well-coded) AND crime (which are not well-coded). That was difficult, but I did it. Later, we were given out-of-the-box ‘topics’ so I got to reprogram the page to fetch articles about sports (again, easy) AND about ‘Crime’ (using the out-of-the-box logic, not mine).
In 2005, we upgraded content management systems again, and once again I had the chance to reprogram the logic to fetch these articles.
I’m proud to say that more than five years later, this link, likely with the original logic, is still up and running on the side of washingtonpost.com’s sports section.
Note: In 2011, this page ceased to operate after The Post installed a new CMS. It had a good run!