Internet Raccoon™️
SUBJECT
GAP RSVP from Why is this website still on the internetBODY
Name: Why is this website still on the internet
Title: it hasn’t been updated in like a year
Dept: please someone let IT know if they can remove it
Office Phone: thank
Cell Phone: you
Email: gilbert.thudpucker@ucf.edu
Alexander Springs, 1961 on Flickr. Given to me by my grandma.
A compilation of the video segments from my last IB Yearbook (2004). Refactored the senior segment a little, but otherwise untouched. Figured I’d upload it before I lost the assets to do this in the future.
(Taken with instagram)
The sad part is that I was the only one from my team to slide =(
Our training situation at SDES IT developed into a full-time training position. Once hired, this trainer requested a way to have users discover classes, sign up for said classes, and be sent reminders for said classes.
For this application, I wanted to dip my toes in .NET MVC (then at version 2). The resulting app absorbed the existing PHP site (including videos, text copies, and links) and introduced a Windows-Auth-protected section that allowed users to sign up for available classes and fill out a profile (which would be pulled up on subsequent visits). After each submission, an iCal-formatted ICS file would be dispatched to their email address, allowing them to track their own class signups.
The delineation of access levels is so painless in MVC, as each controller can easily be filtered to a certain Active Directory user or role/group. This allowed the app to cover public users, domain users, and administrators in one project with ease. Also, building an ICS file from scratch was exciting and highly effective.
While we were not quite prepared for the volatility the trainer position would exhibit over the next few years, the application ran into very few problems during its tenure as a class-signup solution. It is currently on hold for a redesign to match future needs.
petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr): The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
As I tackled more and more UCF sites during my tenure, I discovered that each individual “webmaster” had developed their own server-side implementation for sending emails of basic web form data. Rather than continue to work around their own code, I developed a PHP implementation that generically wrapped httpPost data into a simple email.
The first implementation of FormProcessor was a simple PHP class that had public properties (e.g., to, cc, and subject), some private methods to check for dangerous code (like email header injection), and a public method to send the email. Over time, the public methods have become private in favor of mutator methods, new helper methods have been added (including file attachments, filestream attachments, a development mode, etc.), and any specific stored information has been migrated to a config.ini file.
As complicated as it was to implement an email attachment method without a standard library, it is exceedingly satisfying to use that method in seconds now. Also, finally working with PHP in an object-oriented manner is a breath of fresh air.
At this point, I kind of wish I’d known about the PEAR Mail package, but I’m fairly proud of the implementation; it’s made it effortless for our web content updaters and designers to implement fairly powerful email operations without needing to know much (if anything) about PHP. It continues to make PHP development and deployment speedy and predictable, and it has been integrated into the Template Engine I built to standardize our layouts.
In my quest to make everything I can at UCF better and nicer, I recently decided to tackle the CUF Creed site. The site only displays the UCF Creed (a small collection of statements) and a page of discussion points for professors. I attempted to adapt the styling to the normal UCF template, streamline the display of the tenets, and write some custom CSS to style the blockquote of the main Creed statement. I found an older, seemingly-professionally-produced video about the Creed, uploaded it to our SDES IT YouTube channel, and embedded it opposite the tenets.
This site was developed proactively in Notepad++.
Order of Pegasus is a program that recognizes outstanding students at UCF on an annual basis. I still haven’t actually figured out who runs this program (it seems to change every year), but given that printed materials are already created for the event, I decided to design a much nicer site that utilizes these existing assets.
The site displays the thumbnail and name of each in the Order, opening a Fancybox (lightbox) with a full portrait for each individual when clicked. The full program is included as a PDF and the site is largely driven by typography and these thumbnails only.
Pictured above is a before-and-after of the site designs. This project was completed proactively with jQuery, Fancybox, and Notepad++.
Ringtail Quest 