JasonNeel.com

Project Details

For the final three years of my college career, I worked as a seasonal intern for the County of Greene, Pennsylvania under Webmaster Ruth Thornberg. My duties there were varied, including providing routine content updates as well as creating new material and interfaces to be implemented on the county website. I was also responsible for maintaining an up-to-date intranet site that contains personnel information on county employees for use by the human resources department and the three county commissioners.

One of the larger tasks I had been assigned to do was to incorporate the capability for dynamic content on the site. The idea was to create scripts that would update information instantaneously across the rather large website. Since the server was not capable of supporting server-side scripting languages or a CMS at the time of the projects, I chose to use DHTML methods, specifically centrally stored JavaScript files that would write information that was common among large portions of the website. While not ideal, this did help alleviate some of the workload for the webmaster.

Another task was to create a unique interface for the county's information on its townships. Instead of using Flash for this project, I used a CSS sprite map as the second interface for this page. The map had hotspots and mouseover effects similar to a Flash applet, but does not require a knowledge of Flash to alter.

A great feature on the Greene County website was a calendar of community events. Initially, the calendar used title attributes on link text of the name of the event. This approach required visitors to hover over the link in order to read a description of the event. To replace this, I developed a JavaScript that used DOM methods to create a pop-up window containing detailed information on the event when clicked.

Unfortunately, the Greene County website has been redesigned since I last worked on it, but much of what I did can still be viewed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.