That's where Dan Drinkard came in. Drinkard, a senior web developer for the Post, is part of what he calls "an embedded developer group in the newsroom." His main tasks are to build news apps and tools to help the journalists do their jobs. For this particular project, he set about creating a delay so that the Twitter widget had enough time to load the Twitter stream before Google tried to translate it, and the end result was about "maybe 15 lines of code." (You can see the completed code over here.)

Meanwhile, Washington Post reporter Melissa Bell had been liveblogging news about the Moscow bombing, and it was in one of her blog posts that the developers dropped the widget. The stream monitored mentions of the word "Moscow" in both Russian and English and users could translate the tweets with a small drop-down menu provided by Google Translate. "Obviously Google Translate is not going to translate everything correctly all the time and people are going to use slang and you're going to get the gist of the conversation often, not exactly word for word," Buck said. "But it was still pretty amazing to hit publish and see all these previously indecipherable letters and words transform into meaningful reaction. There was real emotion there to what they were seeing and what was happening. There was this sort of feeling of an opening to another place."

Of course, by the time this widget was put in place, it was five hours after the news had broken, a fact that diminished its value somewhat. But Drinkard said that once a developer has built a tool, it's easier for the team to cue it up for future breaking events. "You tend to deal with things as they come up," he said. "There are a lot of short-term needs but you find common problems over time and you try to predict the things that you can. From there the one-off stuff isn't going to be relevant every time; you don't want to take this hammer and treat everything like a nail and make the conversation or the story into what you already have, so it's better to try to pull in systems that can back it and do what the right thing is for every project."

With dozens of stories appearing in the Washington Post every day and only so many web developers, there's only so many ideas the team can deploy. Deciding which ideas are acted upon comes down to what Drinkard described as "level of effort versus perceived value and impact." His job is to balance long term projects that center around a news event they know is coming -- a major debate or election, for instance -- with these short one-offs. "It's sort of split three ways," he explained. "There's the big stuff initiatives that you know you're going to spend the next six months working on. There's the little stuff that you spend one or two months on, or even a matter of weeks, and there's the little stuff that comes up every day so you can help unstick something."