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 F&M Computing ServicesFranklin & Marshall Computing Services was, professionally speaking, where I began to cut my teeth on web development. I did work as the webmaster for the College Dispatch (the school's editorial paper) and even did some design work there, however, my job at Computing Services was a much more formative and valuable of an experience. Since it was an all-Mac office, Computing Services used everything Adobe for development work, however, since neither myself nor my boss, Teresa, liked GoLive, we used BBEdit, for 90% of our development. This worked particularly well for making edits and troubleshooting a variety of browsers and developing in PHP, however, layout was a bit more opaque just using an text editor. My role was as an assistant to the Educational Resources Director in User Services. Teresa was in charge of tutorials, documentation, in-lab tutorial offerings, and the beginning of the year "Fummer" CD, which is distributed to all student who have any computer on campus. What I did there was write and create (from the ground up) various Quicktime tutorial videos for Mac OS X and built a few PHP applications (which are still in use, although in modified form). Working there when the Mac world was switching over to Mac OS X was particularly fortunate, since it really meant that there was not lack of stuff to do, since F&M was and still is an all-Mac school. ∴ ∴ ∴The first major project I undertook at Computing Services was a series of multimedia tutorials demonstrating the usage of Microsoft Word for Mac and more prominently, Mac OS X. They are, by and large, black and white, and somewhat small (since Teresa demanded that they have lightning-fast load times) and were made with SnapzPro and Quicktime. All but a few are written, narrated, staring, and produced by myself. In addition I created, standardized, and documented the settings and process, so that User Services can create more (which they did) at a later date. Below are a list of many of these movies, primarily those for Mac OS X (since many of the MS Word ones were either written or narrated by Teresa, even if I performed the demo and did the movie). Also, the OS X ones were later and of better quality: ∴ ∴ ∴One other major project that I undertook at F&M's Computer Services was the LyteBytes database. Constructed around MySQL and PHP, the database housed email tips ("LyteBytes") that Teresa would send out to the campus community. Since emails would, of course, be thrown out by the people needing the information, the database was an FAQ resource for the community. The old page was horrible and didn't match the design of the old site. Moreover, the pages were static and every time a new LyteByte was issed, someone would have to make a new page and link it in via into the navigation. So I had to not only make a database to contain all the old ones and figure out a way to retrieve and display them, but they also had to be linkable (e.g. the URL of the displayed entry had to be unique, in case the Help Desk wanted to provide a link to them in an email) and it could be added to via an administrative panel. Using PHP, I created the retrieval interface, which was menu-driven via a JavaScript/CSS menu (which Teresa requested that I use). I was given full reign to design the page, although it need to match the current look, feel and color scheme of the current F&M Computing page. After I designed the inferface, instead of merely injecting new entries in the database, I crafted an admin panel that would take the category, title, and text, parse it properly, and put it both in the database (under a unique reference number) and add it to the JavaScript menus. In the end, I had a very slick (albeit minimal) content management system, developed from the ground up. The code I later recycled to do something similar for the "What's New" entries that dot the Training, User Services and Computing Pages. I am happy to say that the back-end code is still in use, however, with a redesign of both F&M's homepage and Computing websites, the inferface looks different (I think much worse, at least in regards to the LyteBytes page). However, I managed to reconstruct screenshots using some of the materials and Internet Archive's cache of the site.
∴ ∴ ∴Lastly, although it is was not part of my work with F&M Computing Services, it is perhaps worth noting that I was the webmaster and designer for the College Dispatch, the college's editorial paper. Mostly this entailed taking the Quark and Word files, as well as the raw images, and making what was in the press edition appear concurrently on the website. Although this was normally grunt work, I did manage to redesign the homepage and major portions of the site in 2001. This has since (twice I believe) been reworked, however, I am including it my portfolio as an additional example of my design and development work. I admitted wanted to do a more drastic change, but the editors were against it. Again, it exists only in the Internet Archive, however, I reconstructed screenshots to compensate for the missing graphic.
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