What was your best or most challenging project of 2008 that you are proud of?

[Ellen Kanner]

Thanks, Deb, for the idea!

[Tamara Morgan]

Thanks, Deb and Ellen, for this space. Could be very useful, as it's very difficult for me to attend meetings on campus (I'm at DHMC).

My best AND most challenging project was and is learning php for a new website at the college. Very different from html--my first scripting language! I had to go clear to North Carolina and be taught for a day by a lovely young man who was southern enough never to make me feel old!

I'm also learning a little javascript for another project (web-based data gathering for research questionnaires).

My questions and lack of knowledge knows no bounds, but I really enjoy learning and applying what I've learned to sites. There's nothing so satisfying as code that works!

[Ellen Kanner]

Hi Tamara, what are you using for the javascript resource for learning? a book? i'm thinking of learning this/ajax.

i'm hoping this space will work for those not able to attend the meetings. i/we try to add links to the delicious bookmarks of things discussed at the meetings, but that doesn't include the discussion... but i'm guessing there might be some way to add a recorded podcast...hmmmmm. not sure if the entire discussion needs to be recorded either.

[Tamara Morgan]

Hi Ellen!

I'm learning through doing, and copying, and from the very helpful resource person at StudyTrax, which is the company who is providing the software I needed to create the questionnaires in. So I'm not really learning, but becoming familiar with little bits of code slowly.

BTW--nice to put a face to your name!

T

[Ellen Kanner]

One of our projects of note in Web Services is migrating all the Dartmouth websites using OmniUpdate into the same code/template. We had various versions, using different code. Now they all have the same base code. We'll celebrate the work of our freelancer, Susan Lee, and staffer Alan German once all the sites are complete and moved to the new template within the next couple of weeks! For an example of the new template, see, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gradstdy/

[Stew Stryker]

This is long after the end of 2008, but I just wanted to crow a little. We just rolled my first outward-looking web application into production this month. Pat Langille was the project leader and it was about 6 months of serious effort.

The application is named VOLT (for Volunteer On-Line Tool) and supports Dartmouth Development (where I work). It is an information system for alumni who volunteer to solicit their classmates for annual fund donations. There are over 1,000 of these users and we've announced it to about 800 so far. It's very small in terms of the number of web pages, but the functionality is huge for the volunteers and the alumni fund staff.

The platform is the College's Oracle database, using Oracle's Application Express web development platform.