I’ve been meaning to write something substantial about the projects I’ve been working on as a contractor, but it’s been long enough that just getting out a quick summary seems like it’s the best I’m likely to manage any time soon. Here’s some of what I’ve been up to for the last few years:

http://womenslunchplace.org/ – this just launched in November. It’s based on the Drupal open source CMS; my work included participation in the planning process, basic CMS configuration, building the theme based on static HTML & CSS templates from collaborators Jon Sachs and Andrew Rodgers, and writing some custom code to handle donations & related info.

http://rrankk.com – local startup. I did most of the data layer and vote processing work, while a couple other people did the design and interface. The voting stuff was particularly interesting, as it gave me a chance to learn more about the state of the art in voting theory, and to contribute some patches to Benjamin Mako Hill’s rubyvote library.

http://hear-db.org/ – this is a custom contact-management tool I developed with the BU School of Public Health and other local environmental health groups. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to look at without an account. I’m working on releasing the code behind this as an open source project, based on symfony.

http://skylineshuttle.com/ – a rare out-of-town project. My old friend Dave recently started this company, which runs shuttles from Duluth, MN to the Minneapolis airport, and points in-between. Dave is the sort of amazing guy who can teach himself how to build a scheduling and reservation-taking website while handling all the other aspects of launching a business. He’s also smart enough to bring in an old-timer like me to audit and modify his code for security, accessibility, and reliability before launching it publicly.

http://alexandreemmanuel.com/ – a portfolio site for local painter Alexandre Emmanuel, developed with my friend Cliff. This was an interesting challenge, because we needed to come up with a low-budget, bilingual site that could be cheaply hosted and easily added to.

http://jpgazette.com – another Drupal CMS site, which I worked on as part of the Alliance for Community Journalism. Beyond standard CMS configuration and theming, most of my work had to do with getting calendar events to show up similarly to their print edition.