On the Web: American Observer Crime Reports
Skills: PHP, CakePHP, MySQL, XML, JavaScript, Gmap API, Cron

The American Observer is a student publication of the School of Communication at American University. Various courses across the different journalism programs take turns maintaining the site, often publishing several issues a week.

While serving as webmaster for my class’s stint posting a Saturday edition of the Observer, I developed an interactive crime map to support a short article on holiday-related crime.

A command line PHP script parses and stores public data in a MySQL database. The XML data is updated nightly by the District of Columbia on its Web site. Using the CakePHP MVC framework and the Google Map API, I threw together a quick Web site for the Observer that lets site visitors view D.C. police reports by type of crime, neighborhood, police service area or simply chronologically.

While not super polished or feature heavy, to me the project represents the potential for journalistic organizations to use new technology to rapidly develop highly-interactive storytelling features.

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.

On the Web:Child Care Aware, Agency Search Tool
Skills: PHP, MySQL, Apache/mod_rewrite

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.

I took the static site with hundreds of pages in English and Spanish and turned it into an easy to maintain site that included an API for access to cacheable templates, automatic management of language-specific content, and all database content, including data in the organization’s fee-based, Web-based management tool for childcare referral agencies.

The templating system included a sophisticated user tracking feature, allowing site visits to be analyzed with a few SQL queries.

American Forests, a D.C.-based conservation group, hosts the biennial National Urban Forest conference. Fiscally, the success of the conference is crucial to the organization.

To help streamline the logistics of the 2003 event, I was tasked with designing a web-accessible conference database, but given no budget. The purpose was two told: allow attendees to register, pay and modify their registrations, and allow American Forest’s staff to easily update conference speakers, events and registrants from the office and the conference.

I chose PHP/MySQL for the Web site and dynamic data storage, and Access/MyODBC as a front-end interface for the staff to interact with the MySQL database.

The Web site allowed attendees to select a variety of registration types, conference events and payment types. The application also allowed for discount codes, scholarship payments and provided real-time credit card processing.

Using Access with the MyODBC Connector allowed us to rapidly build a front-end application for employees that had a familiar Microsoft Office interface but still connected to the conference data on the Web server. Access also allowed staff to easily perform standard mail merges, print custom name badges and send email to select attendees, all basic necessities for a large, multi-day event.

My role in the project was overall application design, all PHP and MySQL development, and Access application proof of concept.

The application, both the Web and Access pieces, were used again after I left in 2005.

On the Web: The End Is Mir
Skills: Flash 5, PHP, MySQL

In 2001, I had to build a game to demonstrate proficiency in Flash for Advanced Multimedia Journalism, one the required courses in my undergraduate journalism track at UNC. The game was part of a multimedia news package on the recently decommissioned Mir Space Station.

I used the basic requirements as a guide to build a much more complex Asteroids-like game, complete with two types of weaponry and a finite number of lives. I built the three-teir application with PHP, XML, MySQL and Flash 5.