Virtual Brick Campaign
While participating in a cooperative education experience at Brand Logic, I had the opportunity to participate in the development of an online ‘brick campaign’ fundraiser for one of their clients. Partial requirements included a dynamic list of all the donors, with their associated level of donation and a personalized message, and the ability to search for a specific donor and print out a personalized certificate.
The project manager finalized a design, which was passed along to me and my supervisor. I was given free-reign to develop a solution using the design requirements and the mockup images supplied. Since the client’s main site had been developed using ASP.NET 1.1 and C#, I had to learn these languages in order to incorporate the campaign site into the main site. With the guidance of my supervisor, I was able to implement a search function on the page, as well as using ASP.NET structure elements to construct the actual page using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003.
Additionally, I had to learn AJAX principles and, using JavaScript, construct an upward-scrolling bar of names and other information. Basically, the script takes the height of the div-element used to display the names, calculates how many smaller name div’s could fit inside it, adds the individual div’s to the main div, populate the next individual div’s with data to be displayed from a dynamic XML file, and scroll upwards, adding a new individual div at the bottom just before the last div at the top was just out of view. At any given time, there were no more individual div’s on the screen than were able to be viewed, excluding the incoming and outgoing div’s.
A print-specific CSS stylesheet was added to eliminate uneccessary information from being printed by a user. A randomly-assigned male or female photo was selected on loading of the page.
I learned a great deal about programming for wide audiences (IE5.5 or greater) as well as for standards compliant users. I also greatly familiarized myself with manual XML and DOM-manipulation using AJAX and advanced JavaScript principles. This project introduced me to C# and ASP.NET, which I hope to have an opportunity to further my knowledge of, as they are very powerful technologies.
As of 10/08/09, this project is still visible to the public.
