Nothing But Words

Last year I had several web consulting projects. I just finished the last of them, and I’m not planning on doing any more, so I figure now’s a good time to post a wrap-up. All 5 of these sites are running on WordPress.

Boxing Dragons – Original Asian Art Boxing Dragons – Original Asian Art	Body of Knowledge – Personal Training Body of Knowledge – Personal Training	The Hope Funds for Cancer Research The Hope Funds for Cancer Research
Kai’s Candy Company Kai’s Candy Company	Newport Homes for Sale Newport Homes for Sale

• Body of Knowledge Personal Training: the most interesting part of the site is accessible only by their clients. I created a custom WordPress plugin that enables their clients to schedule appointments online. The plugin synchronizes the appointments with Body of Knowledge’s Google Calendar, and on the administrative side, provides invoicing and other bookkeeping capabilities.
• Newport Homes for Sale – Terry Toppa, Broker Associate: you may recognize the last name . This is a site for my Dad’s real estate listings. It uses my Shashin plugin for the property photos and Deko Boko for the contact form. His friend Jim is a photographer, and he provided some fantastic pictures of Newport that really bring the site to life.
• Boxing Dragons – Original Asian Art: I didn’t come up with the graphic designs on the other sites listed here, but I did for this one. I am by no means a graphic designer, but I can fake it sometimes. This site is over a year old now, and drove a lot of the improvements that went into Shashin 2.0 last year.
• Kai’s Candy Company: this was my own business (why can’t I count myself as a client? ), which is now closed. I worked with a wonderful graphic designer, Paula Weindel, who created the site design for us. Our business volume never justified implementing a full-fledged shopping cart; Google Checkout served our needs just fine. After the business closed, I moved the site to free hosting with Google Page Creator.
• The Hope Funds for Cancer Research: this project involved converting a static site to a dynamic one, and training their staff to use WordPress so they can manage most of the site without needing programming skills.

The Clinical Trials search site I developed. My co-worker Joe created the design.

The Clinical Trials search site I developed. My co-worker Joe created the design.

In the six years I’ve been working at Penn, this is my first project that’s publicly accessible: Penn Medicine Clinical Trials. It’s a web application to help researchers as well as the general public find clinical trials at the U Penn School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. My co-worker Joe did a great job on the design, and I implemented the functionality. Joe gets the credit for the Google-like “less is more” user interface, which is dramatically different from the clinical trials sites at other leading medical research institutions.

I wrote a script that runs nightly to pull down XML documents on the clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov (a website created by the National Institutes of Health to provide a central clearinghouse for information relating to clinical trials in the US). The script then parses out the most important data and puts it in a database, where its used for full text searching. For displaying the pages on each trial, I created an XSL template that’s used to dynamically transform the XML documents for display as web pages.

This was actually part of a larger project – the redesign and relaunch of PennMed’s ITMAT (Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics) web site. Joe created that design as well, and I provided the functionality for the member pages. These pages are dynamically updated as members update their profiles and new members join.

I have a few posts in mind based on this work, as I solved some problems on my own where there weren’t adequate explanations online. The topics are XML handling with PHP’s SimpleXMLItetator, XSL transformations with PHP’s XSLTProcessor, and an interesting CSS problem with the Clinical Trials “sticky footer” that we had to figure out. Stay tuned.

Kai’s Candy Company

Kai’s Candy Company

My blog has been quiet recently, as I’ve been focused on creating and launching the site for my new business, Kai’s Candy Company. Our goal with the company is to seek out the most unusual, fun, and tasty candies from around the world, and sell them! We’re starting with Obama and McCain candies that we’ve made especially for the 2008 Presidential campaign. The candies are hand made by artisans in Japan, using traditional kumi ame (rolled candy) techniques.

We also have a Halloween candy poll that’s waiting for your vote! Your votes will help us decide which candy designs to pick for our Halloween candies.