Upcoming tasks: BPC

This Spring/Summer’s revamp of the BPC site will include the following fixes/overhauls:

- When plans are presented to judges, they should be in a random order.

- Judge selection (which happens in several different places) needs to be much more flexible using an AJAX-y system (already built a prototype)

- The system for sending email to judges and teams needs serious work to make it much more usable and flexible.

- The process of finalizing judge feedback requires some work – probably renaming as “finalizing” isn’t the right metaphor.

- Minor things: when teams send email, make sure the email is labeled with team information.  Better uploading widget using the AJAX-based system I built for VIP image uploading.

- Periodically save judge feedback?  Maybe a draft saver?

- It -should- be possible to use other tools to make reports and such better.

More with RSS

One ongoing thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is to create the ability for Peter Winicov to update the WEP press appearances area via a normal blog instead of my own wonky press interface, and then simply consume the blog feed for our info page.  I think I have this working (amusingly, the dev version parses this blog).

I’ll work with Peter to get him set up on WordPress when he gets back from vacation, with the understanding that eventually the blog may move to a Wharton-provided blogging server.

Facebook, anyone?

This is still kind of a low-priority investigative task, but we’re looking at apps that use the Facebook API and trying to find ways to leverage that giant social networking tool to help us with reaching alumni and building community.

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Ok, this is my first post, but let’s get right to business! Each post here, the plan goes, is a project I’m working on. Many will be programming tasks, since that’s kinda what I like to do a lot of.

So: here’s a task.

I have an existing web (.NET 2.0+ MSSQLServer2000) application, which I wrote long ago, which is several Big Things all at once. It supports the EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) program here, and lets administrators enter in information about a guest coming to the campus for a day, including setting up time slots, which can then be registered for by students, who have basic information plus a CV to submit. It does little extra things like producing a printable schedule, handling waitlists, sending email reminders. It’s pretty slick for one of my first .NET apps, but the administrative side isn’t the greatest UI ever, and performance is mediocre because I didn’t bother to think about it.

I’ve been asked to adapt it to accommodate some new features, and will be taking the opportunity to also go over the existing code to tighten some bolts where appropriate. My hope is to get this in working shape, in its new form, by early January at the lastest.

The new features requested/my plans:

- Add a “location” field to each residency, allowing distinction between EIRs in two different places

- Update the admin UI to allow management by location.

- Update registration UI to be location-specific.

- For those in the second location, there needs to be an option to attend the residency via teleconf. That’s an extra data field for the signup itself.

- Admin: better menu-driven approach and UI.

- Both views: examine the way the page loads; chances are it’s requiring extra database hits (i.e. loading the same data object multiple times).

UPDATE 12/20-

The phone-in feature has been de-prioritized by the client. They think it’d be difficult to manage during the sessions.

The database has been updated to include the new fields, and methods on the database have also been updated so things run with either set of code. I’ve built the HTML/ASP.NET markup for the admin page, but need to connect all the wires, and then work on the East coast signup page to make sure it only deals with the East and create a new West signup page. The hope is that it gets cleared up this week.

Update 2 (12/21)

Everything’s up now on the production server. There’s a chance we’ll need to do minor updates here and there, but most of the code is the old code so there’s not a lot of new stuff to worry about.

Update 3

Well, maybe I should open this as a new task, but there are updates to make to the code, in order to fix some of how it works.  (update to the update.  That bug fix is done.  Future ones will be a new task in the list).

Venture a Guess – the dormant version

This is an interesting one.

The goal is to find an “off-season” way to perpetuate the existence of “Venture a Guess” – an online trivia contest we did for students this past semester. I made the mistake of piping up during a meeting with a good idea, and now I have to do right by it!

The result should be roughly static, but should feature a few questions from this year’s contest, with immediate feedback on the answers, and maybe a simple cheesy score at the end.

So I need to decide the best low-hit mechanism for this (probably session vars, keyed from a cookie?) and design the look of it. I had some with the live part making liberal use of portraits of Penn and Franklin as our… well, it’s ambiguous if they’re hosts or contestants… so it’d be nice to keep that style and make a fun little quirky area.

No set deadline; this isn’t high priority, but if I don’t knock it out it could easily sit around forever.

Update a zillion years later – It’s done!  http://wep.wharton.upenn.edu/contest