Work at Work

The new year always kicks off some great new projects at the Coun­ty, most­ly because every­one has mon­ey to spend after bud­get approval. The focus last year was get­ting the new coun­ty home page off and run­ning, and in the year since we’ve made suf­fi­cient tech­no­log­i­cal progress that the home page now requires anoth­er rewrite. This time, if all goes accord­ing to plan and my knowl­edge of RSS and our Synapse Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem pays off, the home page will be able to update itself. This is prob­a­bly some time off though, as we have to put most of the cur­rent coun­ty sites into the CMS in the first place.

There are a few sites already out there run­ning the CMS, the most notable of these is the Depart­ment of Devel­op­men­t’s site. While I’m still hav­ing fits over get­ting .NET to serve valid, stan­dards-based code, the site itself has much bet­ter flow, and a sig­nif­i­cant­ly updat­ed look and feel. Hope­ful­ly it actu­al­ly feels like it has been designed, instead of just built.

The big tick­et item for the first quar­ter of 2008 is a com­plete over­haul of the Board of Elec­tions site, putting it into the CMS, mak­ing it more like a por­tal and cre­at­ing pages with vot­er-spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion and inter­ac­tive elec­tion-track­ing as well. In addi­tion to the end-user bells and whis­tles, behind the scenes we should end up with less labor inten­sive updat­ing process­es and sig­nif­i­cant­ly less serv­er load.

Oth­er sites cur­rent­ly in the pipeline include the Office of Home­less Ser­vices, the Board of Coun­ty Com­miss­sion­ers, Coro­ner, and Jus­tice Affairs. This is a good chance for me to build up some earned time so that I can take time off when the kid arrives.

Here at home, I’ve switched O/M over to Blue­host, an all-around good idea, as I can and am doing a redesign with mul­ti­ple Word­Press instal­la­tions and data­bas­es.