Hey, I'm Alexandra White.
Let's build a better digital experience.

Blog posts on Web Development

August 03, 2015

Interactive Engagement Group Portfolio and Technical Blog

Interactive Engagement Group Portfolio and Technical Blog

Back in October of 2014, I had a bit of a dry spell at WNET. There weren’t as many new projects coming in, and I was still green to the way our more complex web properties work. Instead of sitting around and reading the various internet news aggregates, I decided to attack a problem I knew about even before starting my job that August.

The Interactive Engagement Group (IEG) website was a flat, two-page piece of brochure ware. It was built to appease the powers-that-be, but was in no way indicative of the type of amazing work that the department was capable of doing. I wanted to take this project head on and lead the way to a beautiful, responsive, and informative website that would not only show off what we could do, but show off the expertise of our team. To do this, I needed buy-in from my boss, head of the technical team, and from the head of our department.

To Get Buy In, I Came Prepared

Though I talked about why I thought it was important with my boss and with the developer team, I knew I would need a lot more than a “good idea” to get department funding to build the site. I put my professional writing skills to work and wrote a content strategy.

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March 30, 2015

Building a Bingo Plugin for WordPress

Two weeks ago I was presented a new challenge: build a bingo card for Antiques Roadshow that randomly populated with icons on refresh and on-command (by a “refresh” button), make those icons clickable, indicate a win if five in a row are selected, and last but not least, allow the user to share if they do indeed win. The bingo card (Edit: as of 2019, this post has been removed) was released today, just in time for tonight’s episode.

This was the perfect opportunity to build a WordPress plugin. If done right, bingo could be played in multiple posts at the same time, instead of just played for a one-off event.

The plugin itself is fairly straightforward. Content administrators add two shortcodes to the post they hope to Bingo-fy. 24+ randomized images should be uploaded to that post (not including the image for the free space, winner images, a bingo header, or anything else). All additional images used should be uploaded to the media library but not attached to the post.

ars-bingo-card

The first shortcode, [bingo_gallery], adds the images to a hidden div within the post. This will allow the shortcode [bingocard] to refer to said images to populate a table, as well as to a set freespace image, winner image, and header image, all of which are set on the Bingo Settings page. The actual order of these shortcodes within the post doesn’t matter.

At the moment, the plugin is built for three posts with Bingo cards but can be scaled up depending on the user’s knowledge of PHP. I hope in version 2.0 I can more easily add up to ten bingo cards in the back-end so that PHP/jQuery knowledge isn’t necessary for those wishing to add more bingo cards.

You can download the Bingo Card Plugin on GitHub.

October 31, 2014

Why I Love Passion Projects

This post was originally featured on Grammar. Style. Life.

I’ve done a lot of freelance work in the past few years, but nothing has been more fun and more enjoyable than the work I did for free. I’ve built wedding websites for friends and a site for my roommate’s feature documentary, Sanskriti.

There are a number of reasons I think I enjoy this. Partly, I am giving it as a gift. I love giving gifts more than anything, finding that perfect item for a person I care about, and watching their eyes light up when they receive it. Sometimes, that’s homemade cookies. Once, it was a personal travel journal where I hand wrote best places to visit in the United Kingdom and printed subway maps. But one of the best gifts I can give someone is the time and effort to give a website that is better than any generic template they could find, or a free service provider with ads.

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July 08, 2014

When I Started Calling Myself a “Woman in Tech”

I was recently asked by a friend of mine, an extraordinarily smart and talented young woman who I met while at a hackathon in Boston, to contribute a story about what it means to be a woman in tech. She gave me no parameters, no length requirement. The only request was that the story focused on a time I was a proud to be a woman in tech.

Let me start by saying for the most part, I’ve been pretty fortunate. I can’t speak to how my childhood influenced my career decisions (I went from dreaming of Harvard Law to becoming an actress to becoming a professor to… well, what I do now). I never thought of myself as someone who would build websites, though I always thought it was cool in concept. I thought I was sneaky when, in my sophomore year, I made my knowledge of CSS seem much more in-depth by using a template website.

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March 16, 2014

Building a Better (Post) Filtration for JCC Camps

I was first assigned the task of “build a website for JCC Camps” back in July 2013. When this happened, the talk was mostly emulating our existing directory website for JCCs, DiscoverJCC.com. That website was built before my time, using a software from our Preferred Vendor, Accrisoft. My boss would take the lead on the design, and we would create a modern website that tested the limits of our brand standards.

My goal was to create a customized directory profile that was broken up by lots of small pieces of meta data, with a lot of possibilities for searching. My boss created two mockups: the homepage followed the trend of the single page website, with four sections, and the inner profile page highlighting various pieces of information. It was my task to realize this design.

JCC Camps Website

The Building Process

I began building a custom WordPress theme for the JCC Camps website in August 2013. The most arduous task was creating a filtration system that not only worked, but that was actually useful for our intended audience, potential parents of campers. There was no point in having eight different options for searching, if parents only cared about location, type of stay (day or overnight), and specialized activities. Read More

May 31, 2013

The Great Design Experiment

As you may have noticed, my portfolio got a facelift! It’s been a long time coming. I created the actual design mockups last February, in the midst of a creative brainstorming quest at my neighborhood coffee shop (it helped that the internet was shaky and therefore I kept on task). I created a beta website, and began re-mobilizing the custom portfolio I had built in 2011.

I had several goals in my redesign.

  • Create a responsive design that not only adjusted to different sizes, but looked good in the process.
  • Refresh the homepage from “I’m a recent college graduate” to “I’m a working web professional.”
  • Re-design the custom post type I built for my portfolio pieces, re-imagining the purpose and the display.
  • Make an overall more aesthetically pleasing color palette and design.

I was very happy when I launched my site in September 2011 and had fantastic feedback. However, it was important to me to rejuvenate what was built to make the site work for 2013 standards.

I spent a lot of time researching web design professionals and their portfolios. I dug deep into the pages, looking at the overall concepts as well as the tools they used to build it. In the end, I stuck with WordPress and chose to adapt HTML5 Boilerplate and the 1140px Grid to make my site responsive. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the content would layout, what sort of white space I was interested in using, and how images would be displayed.

It’s been about three weeks since the new site went live. There are still a few kinks here and there, a few images that need to be re-adjusted. But I feel so much better when I share my website. It feels great to say, “Hey. I built this. I made this happen.” And isn’t that what it’s all about?