Web

Farewell, old friend!

Code

I’ve been working on doing a “virtual” clean-up recently: taking down old projects, cleaning up some servers I manage, updating my about info, etc. One old project, in particular, is making me feel a bit nostalgic – I’m saying goodbye to bootstrapicons.com. It was a search engine for bootstrap and font awesome icons, which allowed users to tag icons so they were easier to find. Launched way back in June 2013 it was the first personal project I made that ever got any kind of traction. I still remember the first day it hit over 1000 monthly users – I had made it big time!

Okay, so maybe it didn’t exactly make me famous. Still, it got posted in a few bootstrap resource groups, had quite a few user-submitted tags for icons, and was really fun to work on. Alas, all good things must come to an end. Once Fontawesome introduced a similar search to their main icon list my traffic plummetted, and it had just kind of sat there since then. So sadly, for the common good of not having really old and likely at this point not incredibly secure projects sitting around the web, it is gone.

(PS: For anyone keeping score the cutting-edge technology powering this bad boy I believe was PHP 5.3, with a sweet jQuery powered autocomplete filter.)

GVNext

Code

I finished up another fun project at work a few weeks ago – a ground-up rebuild of the GVSU news site – https://www.gvsu.edu/gvnext. The previous site wasn’t built to showcase photography very well and the new version highlights that to allow for more or a storytelling feel than just an information dump. Here are a few of the details on some of the fun parts as well as some of the challenges.

Another React Editor

Like the GVMagazine site, I created a while ago this site utilized React for the “article builder” – where content is actually added to stories by the authors. While getting React to play well without infrastructure can be a hassle, in cases like this it is really worth the effort. The editor ended up sharing so much with the GVMagazine that I am thinking of abstracting away some of the differences and writing a react library to use in both of them. With the Fall semester starting soon I probably won’t have time to work on it anytime soon, but I think it would be an interesting problem to solve and also cut down on ongoing maintenance of the two systems – maybe I could even open-source it.

Migration

One of the requirements for this project was that all of the old content be imported into the new system. While migrations are rarely fun, this was going to be taking content that was written in all the way back to 1999! The content had been imported into several versions of the site since then so mapping all of the images, tags and article content to the new system took some time.

Overall it was a fun project, it was on a but of a tight timeline and it integrates with so many projects at GVSU it was a bit overwhelming at first, but it’s also one of the most visited sites on gvsu.edu, and it’s always fun working on things that really get used a lot.

GVSU Destination Report

Code

I just finished up a bit of a fun site at work: https://www.gvsu.edu/destination. It’s the first time GVSU has built a dedicated web version of this report. Since a lot of the work I have been doing lately has been heavily into back-end application development, it was nice to get a break and make something where I could focus more on the design.

I also got to create an interactive React component to look up major-specific data about degrees. This was cool both because it makes it easier for students and potential students to see what they can do with a degree, and I also got to use Victory Charts, a React graphing library I had been wanting to play with. It turned out pretty nice, easy to use and make accessible:

Animated image showing react component displaying major specific data
React is really great for interactions like this

It proved a little tricky to integrate into the rest of the site. Mostly because I set it up using create-react-app and really didn’t want to eject it out of that. I ended up creating it as a sort of sub-project whose base HTML file then gets included in the larger project via the back end language. It worked really well, I would definitely use this method if you come across a similar situation.

March: Online Overhaul

Random

For March I am going to try to redesign both www.brentswisher.com and www.thewebcounts.com, as well as update my profile on all of my social media accounts. Just one of those things that has needed to been done for a while that I keep putting off, so I thought I would make a challenge out of it. I also thing that one of the reasons I haven’t been posting as much as I used to is that the site has become a little dated and I just don’t care to look at it as much. Hopefully a redesign will get back on the blogging bandwagon a little more frequently.

Update: 4/6

Well it took a late night on the 31st and a few fixes after the fact, but I updated both brentswisher.com and www.thewebcounts.com this month. I also went through and updated my linkedIn/twitter/facebook info. The new redesign of this site is the first completely from scratch design I have created as a WordPress template. It was an interesting experience, definitely a different environment.  It was also a good php refresher, it had been a longer time than I had realized since I had done any actual coding outside of work.