The Daily Edition is a simple website that aims to keep you informed about what your friends and colleagues are writing about without overwhelming you or eating up all your time.

To make an analogy: words are like calories. The Daily Edition aims to prevent information obesity by delivering your news in a series of issues that are constrained by the number of words they can contain. 2500 of them, to be precise.

You start by telling The Daily Edition who your influencers are: these are the luminaries who inspire you to do awesome things. Specifically, your influencers are an ordered list: the higher a name is on the list, the more likely it is for an issue to contain news from them.

The Daily Edition values diversity in an information diet, too, though. If one of your influencers is a prolific blogger who writes 3 posts a day, every issue will only contain one of those posts, to make room for other voices.

Publishing and reading an issue a day is just a recommendation, however. You're welcome to publish more issues. But every time you finish reading an issue, you might want to ask yourself if your time is best spent consuming more awesome, or making your own.

You'll need git and Python 2.5 or above.

At your shell prompt, run:

$ git clone --recursive git://github.com/toolness/daily-edition.git
$ cd daily-edition/de_site
$ python manage.py syncdb
$ python manage.py loaddata people
$ python manage.py runserver

During this process, you'll be asked if you want to create a new superuser. Do so, and remember the username and password.

Once you're done, open your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ to start using the app.

This website is a Django app.

Copy de_site/settings_local.sample.py to de_site/settings_local.py and edit as necessary. Run manage.py test daily_edition to make sure that the app integrates properly with your setup.

See fabfile.py, a Fabric script, for more context on what's needed to deploy the app.

This app was originally implemented in early 2010 as a command-line utility that used Christopher Blizzard's whoisi as a repository for influencer identity information. Since then, whoisi.com has been shut down and the command-line utility has been turned into a multi-user Django app, which means a few things:

• The back-end implementation doesn't scale well at all. At best, each deployment of The Daily Edition can probably only be used to serve a handful of people, rather than hundreds or millions.

• Adding or changing information about influencers can only be done via the Django admin interface.