Welcome to the Oyez Beta!

Welcome to the new Oyez beta site! We are releasing a beta version of this new and more powerful resource to gain some experience from users and to gather your recommendations regarding features we have implemented and ideas for new features that you would like us to deploy.

You can access the site and help us out by visiting

http://beta.oyez.org:8080/

What's new?

The list is long but overall the site has been completely rearchitected to deal with all the information we would like to share.

1. Audio is now accessible from the home page or any page where we have planted an audio link.

2. New player for controlled playback (play, pause, stop) including synchronized transcripts when these are available.

3. More audio: virtually all SCOTUS audio from the 1990 Term through the 2004 Term is now accessible. We will provide a downloadable MP3 as well as a streamed MP3. As older and newer audio becomes available, we will add it to the site.

4. MP3 downloads will include the transcript of the argument in the lyrics tag visible in iTunes.

5. High quality images of the justices, both photographs and portraits. (Portraits are formal commissions and are made public when justices are no longer on the bench.)

6. Images of all justice groups. These group photographs date back to the 1860s.

7. Improved voting data. We will report voting details in every case back to 1953. Votes will be displayed using headshots of the justices. Active images will signal voting with the majority. Greyscale/washout will signal voting with the minority. You can sort the votes by seniority (the default setting) or by ideology. The ideological array is based on the Martin-Quinn index computed each Term back to 1937. The index arrays the justices from most liberal (on the left) to most conservative (on the right).

8. Additional non-SCOTUS audio and video. We shall provide access to 14 hours of interviews with Justice William O. Douglas. The interviews were conducted by Professor Walter E. Murphy of Princeton University while Douglas was still on the bench. We shall provide access to the nearly 40 hours of Justice Harry A. Blackmun's oral history. In each circumstance, the audio/video will be synchronized to a text transcript, facilitating searching and playback. (Both coming soon.)

9. Much improved search of all items.

10. RSS for searches and podcasts. Use this in your feedreader to stay up-to-date on new content.

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PLEASE NOTE: When we go live with the full release, links to the current OYEZ site may no longer work. We will attempt to provide a cross-walk from the old site to the new site, but in many circumstances these links will no longer be valid. We shall do our best to limit the fallout from this switch.
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We very much welcome your comments/suggestions/praise/criticisms. This is especially important between September 1 and September 15. You can send your comments to: beta@oyez.org

For the entire Oyez5 Team,

Jerry Goldman

The technical case for an version of the Oyez site

Hello, my name is Chris Karr and I've been overseeing the technical aspects of the redesign of the Oyez site. Jerry Goldman will describe some of the non-technical reasons for the new site, so I figured that I would focus on the technical reasons.

First of all, since my introduction to the project in 2003, the need of Oyez users and the technological landscape in which Oyez resides has changed drastically over the past three years. In that time, RSS and podcast feed technology went mainstream, Internet users started to prefer downloadable versus streamed audio as devices like the iPod caught on in popularity, and users wanted more media choices aside from straight audio.

The current version of the site at www.oyez.org was originally designed to serve as a catalog for streaming audio files. As new things came along, we attempted to include new types of content in the site, with varying degrees of success. Our introduction of MP3 downloads was very successful, while our attempts to better open up our Image collection was less so. We took a stab at making the site work with podcasting clients, and failed for the most part.

The primary reasons for these problems was that the current architecture was not designed with these types of things in mind. When something new came along, we attempted to tack it on without disturbing the rest of the site too much. As the last three years elapsed, the site began to resemble "spaghetti code". New feature additions became problematic, and maintenance of existing features became more burdensome also.

So, our solution to this problem was to chuck the old site out the window, and begin building a new one from the ground up using more modern software development tools and designs. While much of the content has migrated from the old site, the new site is running on brand new code and a brand new architecture.

This approach has been very successful so far. The old site was created in more than six months. The new one has been put together in less than three. Our new architecture has been very accommodating to the new features we have written, including pervasive podcast feeds throughout the site, more media types (images, video, text), more information about the court (including who sat on what court when), and a simpler (but more robust) search. We've done away with the problematic RealPlayer and replaced it with a simpler and easy-to-use Flash-based player that works much like the ones on sites like YouTube. I could go on about the changes, but I'll let you explore those yourself.

However, since this site is brand-new code, there will inevitably be bugs. We're opening this beta so that we can harness your help in locating these bugs and solicit your feedback about how the site can be most useful for you. If you run into problems, or have a suggestion, please don't hesitate to let us know.

(And just so you know, we're not planning on being one of those new sites that is in a state of perpetual beta. Once we get the bugs hammered out and your suggestions implemented, we will be going out of beta and nuking the old site. So, if there's a feature or piece of media that you used on the old site, let us know what that was so we can prioritize it and make sure that it's there before we pull the plug on the old box.)

Bug Thread

If you encounter any bugs while using the new Oyez beta site, report them here.

When you report a bug, please include a descriptive statement about the problem you encountered, what kind of computer you are using (Window XP, MacOS X, Linux), the browser you were using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari), and (very importantly) the URL of the page you were visiting when the problem occurred.

Thanks for helping us develop and publish the next generation of the site.