Josh Williams

On the Web: Newsletter Subscription Manager
Skills: PHP, MySQL, Sendmail

As the web developer for all external-facing Web publications for the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, I maintained childcareaware.org.

The site featured a couple of electronic newsletters, each with a different home-grown backend, that the organization wanted consolidated.

Historically, the information technology infrastructure at the organization had been heavily Perl and Java on Linux for Web and system administration but was moving towards PHP for all external Web applications and some system administration tasks.

I built a command line tool in PHP and MySQL that managed subscribers and delivered HTML and text-only newsletters to them. There was a simple PHP page that allowed site users to maintain their subscriptions. On the web side, the newsletter subscribers’ database was integrated into the site-wide API.

I also built the HTML template for the newsletter, based on the established graphic identity package for the childcareware.org site.