Stuff I've done lately
Late 2003 and early 2004
New World Online Web publishing system
I've been working for the past few months on a content-management system from the ground up. It's coming along quite nicely; we'll be launching its first version in mid-January. Eventually it will power LJWorld.com, KUsports.com, Lawrence.com, our upcoming television news site and commercial sites.
Various things in June/July
- Lawrence weather site -- Given the site's design mockup, I coded it into XHTML and a completely CSS-based layout. I also created the backend of the site, which includes an admin interface for the weathermen and seamless integration of more than 10 automated weather feeds. (I've written more about this on my weblog.)
- Lawrence.com blog registration -- I tied my registration software into my weblog system to fulfill the requirement of requiring user registration on some blogs' comment systems.
- Lawrence.com registration -- I wrote the registration/login system, which lets people post restaurant, band and movie reviews. (More is coming soon.)
- Lawrence.com restaurant and movie reviews -- I wrote this review system, which lets users rank restaurants and movies in five categories. Users can also add text reviews.
- Lawrence.com: The Turnpike -- I automated this site, which is a companion site for our local-band TV show.
- Lawrence.com targeted restaurant advertising (Example) -- I wrote an ad system that lets a restaurant advertise "Extras" on its specific restaurant page in our restaurant guide.
May 6, 2003
Lawrence.com event reminders via your cellphone
Every event in our calendar database now features a "remind me on my cellphone" option. Put in your phone number, choose your service provider, tell us when you want us to contact you, and we'll send a text message reminder to your phone.
April 2003
Aside from the large, long-term projects that have been taking up much of my time, here are a few things I put together in April:
Lawrence.com downloads page
Tying our events database, local band database and sound clip database together, this page displays random sound clips from local bands who are scheduled to perform soon -- ordered by when they're performing. Pretty cool stuff. The video section does the same, although we don't have nearly as many videos as sound clips.
Lawrence.com band search
I made our local band database searchable by genre and band name. The search engine accounts for common misspellings.
April 2, 2003
Lawrence.com restaurants hours now include kitchen hours
Previously the site only listed each restaurant's business hours, which may or may not correspond with kitchen hours. Having kitchen hours was an important change to make because it makes the site's restaurants open now page much more useful.
April 1, 2003
Lawrence.com advanced restaurant search
Added the ability to search by whether a place has outdoor seating.
Lawrence.com event submission tool
Automated the addition of user-submitted events to our events database.
March 31, 2003
LJWorld.com online polls
Finished my improved poll tool, which disallows people from voting more than once. (We'd had problems with the legacy tool.)
March 30, 2003
City commission candidate selector and school board candidate selector
Updated our candidate selectors with fresh questions, a different interface and a different algorithm.
March 29, 2003
Lawrence.com blog comments
Added comment functionality to the blog system I built.
March 25, 2003
Top lawrence.com MP3 downloads
Automated the page. Now all audio content is automated: the main MP3 list, the radio stations and lists on individual band pages.
March 21, 2003
2003 NCAA Bracket Contest standings page
Put together searchable, sortable list of current standings in the KUSports.com bracket contest. Automated the creation of detail pages with various information about each contestant, plus a link to his or her full bracket in PDF format.
Wrote script that parses our automated sports-scores feed and updates the bracket-contest standings automatically, every 15 minutes.
