Webfault Editor
- Spring 2004
- Computer Science House
- PHP, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS
I was a member of RIT’s Computer Science House throughout my college career. Along the way, I participated in or headed up a number of projects, but this was the biggest one I did myself.
CSH has a weekly newsletter called segfault, with a web version called webfault. The person editing the newsletter collects articles from people in House, and uses them to build the weekly newsletter in some desktop publishing app like Adobe Pagemaker. The process of collecting articles, laying it out, printing it (copies were hung around the floor), and posting it to the web was very time consuming. I wanted to streamline the process by building a web-based editor for the newsletter.
The plan was to allow House members to submit articles through the website. The person editing the newsletter would select the articles that would be used, and lay them out in the pre-defined template. A PDF could be generated and the web site updated automatically once the issue was complete.
The editing portion of the project did reach completion, and it’s capable of generating a PDF. However, I was working on this project in the spring, and finals and summer break soon interfered with my progress. I never had a chance to go back and complete the project, but I’m proud of the part I did do, and other members of the House seemed pretty impressed with it.
The site was built in PHP with a PostgreSQL database and is only available on the CSH member site. At one point, I tried copying the site to my portfolio here, but had some trouble with it. Now, four years later, it’s not nearly as impressive or interesting as it was at the time. Rather than spend time tweaking it to work here, I’d rather spend time on newer, exciting-er projects.
