Smart Homes

This desk covers the devices that live in a house and the standards that let them talk to one another. Lights, locks, sensors, cameras, and the small computers that command them belong here when the question is whether a command can finish on the local network. A certification, a new radio, a controller that stays in the home, or a vendor decision to require an account for a task the device could do alone is a story on this beat. A shopping roundup is not, and neither is a phone review that only mentions a doorbell in passing. The reader this desk serves wants to know if the house still works when the account page does not.

The sentences above the wire are the part Futureweb writes. The short version is the line an answer engine can quote, and it names the beat without pointing at another site. Briefs, when they are filed, are original. They are the only article URLs this desk adds. A brief needs two leads, or one lead plus a standard, before it earns a page. A single outlet post is a lead, not a story we retell.

On the wire is the notebook. A line is listed only when that outlet's feed included a title, a date, and a description of at least a short paragraph. Card text with no date, a headline with no description, and a title glued to itself stay in the pull log. The rail takes the newest complete lines, at most two from one outlet, until it has ten. Each line is the outlet's headline and links to them. Futureweb does not give that line a page of its own.