When former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen were on trial for corruption, we wanted to drive more traffic to our live coverage. The main spotlight on the PilotOnline.com homepage was static and didn’t reflect the nature of our coverage very well.

The coverage was hosted in a CoverItLive event, where our reporters were sending in tweets and our online producers were typing up news flashes to keep people updated throughout the day.

Using the python-twitter module and the CoverItLiive API, I wrote a program that hosted a live feed on the homepage that updated every five minutes with the latest information. I added timestamps to the updates to reflect the immediacy of the news.

The widget was on the PilotOnline.com homepage for two weeks, driving tens of thousands of hits to our coverage.