Tag Archives: webdevelopment

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Making an Impact

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Recently the Poughkeepsie Farm Project received a $100,000 grant for the Building Bridges program to attack hunger in the city of Poughkeepsie. This is part of a Department of Agriculture initiative to fund pilot programs and see what works so that they can apply it at a larger level in the US. 10 grants were given, and by all appearances the PFP was the smallest of the organizations that got the grant.

Which made me wonder. My major contribution to the organization has been a revitalized website, which I’ve been working on for two years. As we were approaching our annual volunteer retreat I dug into the analytics, and not surprisingly there were hits from the Dept of Ag in there. The website was not the reason that we got this grant, Susan Grove is an impressive organizer, and has come up with a great program. But I’m sure it helped.

It helped to show that as an organization we have resources at many levels, including a solid technical backing. It helped because it highlighted the depth and breadth of the programs run by the organization. It helped because it had current information on current programs, and thus showed how high the activity level is. It made an impact by exposing all that is done in the PFP in a way that’s easy to see and consume from the outside.

I felt very good that I was part of a team that helped make this happen.

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New MHAA Website

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been redoing the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association website.  It looks like this:

Yes, it’s dark, but that’s when astronomy happens.  The site is built on Drupal, as I’ve gotten some experience there recently doing sites for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and MHVLUG.  For people that want to know more about the tech side, I’ll be giving a talk in January at MHVLUG.

I did come across one really odd thing in working on the three boxes (I was calling them chicklets, but they look less like that with content in them). Round corners in CSS are awesome (thank you w3c). IE9, at least the version in Adobe Browser labs, still doesn’t support it (really Microsoft? I thought you were getting down with the standards). While a TD can have a round background, it’s border is always square (I almost understand why, but it definitely limits what you can do. It also took me a while to realize this was happening as the round is subtle enough on the front page). Div height 100% doesn’t work inside a TD (it seems like it should, but no one implemented it that way).

So the only way to get 3 columns that correctly degrade to 2 columns (50% of screen each) when one is missing (there will not always be a special event), have round borders, and be the same height is…. jquery. While on the one hand, it seems crazy, on the other hand, yay for jquery. You can view the source on the website to see how I did it.