The Gray Geek

Within the last year the site of the Historic Highland building was redesigned. I had no part in the redesign other than to install and manage the site. However, the City Club decided to redesign its site to match the "look" of Highland. I was asked to do this reimplementation of the City Club site.

The new City Club site is done with PHP and MySQL, using the Pear DB abstraction.

The graphics for the Historic Highland site were done by "The Studio at Nederland". The New City Club site is based on that graphical design, using modifications of the Highland CSS.

The new site will go into production in July. Until then the test version can be found here. However, most of the functionality is only available to members. If you wish to see the functionality, contact me for a login.

Douglas Scheffer (303)443-4430 or douglas@highlandcityclub.com

Within the last year the site of the Historic Highland building was redesigned. I had no part in the redesign other than to install and manage the site. However, the City Club decided to redesign its site to match the "look" of Highland. I was asked to do this reimplementation of the City Club site.

When I joined the City Club they already had a low functionality "brochure" website (see 'the public website' below), built by their receptionist using Dreamweaver. They wanted to add a members-only website with limited access, housing member and scheduling information, allowing forum discussion, blogging, etc. After my exposure to the Tiki-Wiki software (see Aviation Services) it seemed to me that Tiki-Wiki offered a lot of functionality at relatively low cost. It wasn't really clear just what functionality the City Club members needed, so with Tiki-Wiki I could quickly provide a lot of different options. For a startup site like this the trick isn't whether the site is pretty, but whether it has enough content to draw and hold members interest. With Tiki-Wiki we could start quick and try to populate the site; and if later we knew better exactly what was needed we might redo it, with more specific feature targets.

Tiki-Wiki is PHP 4 with ADODB database abstraction, using the Smarty template engine. It is hosted at a commercial hosting service. I look after the website using the tools provided by the hosting service. Like all the sites I manage the code base is kept under svn and I work on it with eclipse.

Most of the features needed by the City Club were present. To create some of the features of the member site I had to supplement the Tiki-Wiki code with some hand-written modules, notably a member profile feature, an upcoming events feature, and an ability to issue and track RSVPs on the calendar. These, and a few others, required changes in the Tiki-Wiki PHP/Smarty code base.

I was asked by the City Club to copy the design of the existing public site, a design I don't especially like. I incorporated the background and logo into the Tiki-Wiki code. I also built some gradients and things in Photoshop to fit with the overall color scheme.

Very little of the functionality of the City Club members site can be seen without logging in, but if you want to look at it, it can be found here. However, to see more of the functionality one can log in to the test version of the site which I maintain on my own server. Contact me for access.

Jorian Wilkins (303)443-4430 or jorian@highlandcityclub.com

After I finished the member site, the City Club managers asked me if I could clean up and make some modifications to the original public site. The site had originally been written with DreamWeaver by a wannabe, with some amateurish javascript, and a non-functioning MySql backend database which was supposed to eventually become the foundation for a member site.

The public site is done in PHP, with my stock scripts. It is entirely CSS based. It has database logic for connecting to the back end MySql database of the member's site (see above) so that it can extract information about upcoming events which the City Club managers insert into the members site. The site is hosted on the same commercial service that houses the member site.

In building the new site I moved entirely to a CSS approach, but because the City Club managers had been involved in designing the look of it, and were happy with the way it looked, I more or less totally preserved the look of the old site: pictures and menus in the same places, etc. Thus I don't claim to have been the designer of the site.

The City Club public site can be seen here.

Jorian Wilkins (303)443-4430 or jorian@highlandcityclub.com

Later, some members of the City Club decided they would like to try out a more capable blogging engine that the one incorporated in Tiki-Wiki, and they chose the WordPress software.

WordPress is an open-source customizable blogging engine, written in PHP. The engine was set up separately on the same hosting service as the other City Club sites by another City Club member who was interested in experimenting with it. After it was running I was asked to find a way to better integrate the two.

I figured out the relevant parts of the WordPress code base, and made use of an extensibility feature already built into the software on which I could build a login hook. By using the hook I was able to avoid making extensive changes to the WordPress code base, which should smooth the transition to new versions. The modifications I made in Tiki-Wiki and WordPress allow a logged in Tiki-Wiki/Member site user to transition to the WordPress blog site without having to log in again. This is done with a time sensitive nonce which eliminates playback vulnerabilities and reduces the risk of compromise to virtually nil, because WordPress is able to construct it's verification by reference to the member site's user database.

The WordPress skins are shipped with the product. I did no UI work on WordPress.

One can visit the blog site without logging in here, but one cannot see any of the work I've done there.

Jorian Wilkins (303)443-4430 or jorian@highlandcityclub.com

This is a relatively static site describing the features of the Historic Highland Building, where the City Club is located. The City Club's founder is owner of the building, so there is a relationship. I was asked to have a look at this more-or-less orphaned site, and to make a few modification, but I hardly claim it as my own.

A project has been commissioned to revamp the site, and I'm tasked with building it in collaboration with a design group in Boulder, but the design group hasn't yet completed their "new look".

At the moment this is a pure html site. I work on it with aptana under eclipse. The site is hosted at a local Boulder hosting site, and I now maintain it.

The graphics are being redone by "The Studio" in Nederland, Colorado. The current graphics were done (according to the notation on the page) by someone named "Design Diving".

The Historic Highland site is available here and requires no login.

Jorian Wilkins (303)443-4430 or jorian@highlandcityclub.com

The City Club has an extensive private library, and wanted a way to manage the collection. I took the open-source OpenBiblio package, and incorporated it into the City Club site for the use of the librarians in cataloging the collection.

This site is simply the open-source "OpenBiblio" package. I have had to make no modifications to it, except add a logo.

The logo I inserted into OpenBiblio was taken from the flyleaf cover used in the library

Since the library site contains virtually nothing of mine, and since it requires authentication to access, I don't encourage you to visit it. If you feel for some reason that you want to see it, contact me and I will arrange it.

Jorian Wilkins (303)443-4430 or jorian@highlandcityclub.com