Lui

David Lui - Discovery Center Web Site

As a Spring 2012 Discovery Program Intern, my main duty and responsibility is to maintain, modify, and update the Binghamton University's Discovery Program website. Feel free to compare it to the original. Not too bad right? Click here for progression photos of the website transformation and makeover.

The main task at hand was to implement a new website design that will enhance the appearance of the website to a more modern feel in order to attract more online users to visit the page on a daily if not frequent basis. To do so, I used HTML and PHP. Without a strong background of web programming languages, I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with the large documentations, manuals, and references of HTML and PHP as well as the support documentation of OmniUpdate (the Content Management System I had to use for .binghamton.edu webpages). There is nothing better than researching and learning the markup publishing languages of the World Wide Web for web pages and web development!

Essay

echo "<br /><h1>CAUTION! Programmer At Work</h1><br />";

dlui1:~$ ./userProfile

dlui1:~$ Please enter your name: David Lui

dlui1:~$ Loading user profile...

User Found!

David's Personal Information:

Age: 10100₂

Currently a Sophomore majoring in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences at SUNY Binghamton University.

Enrolled in the CDCI Internship Program-

Agency: Discovery Program

Agency Supervisor: Lisa Bowker

Agency Phone Number: ...

...ERROR LOADING REST OF INFORMATION...

THE PROGRAM WILL TERMINATE NOW!

dlui1:~$

This is an average workday for David, a second year programmer in charge of maintaining, modifying, and updating the Binghamton University's Discovery Program website. David's main responsibility for the Discovery Program Agency is to implement a new web design that will enhance the appearance of the website and attract more online users to visit the page on a daily if not frequent basis. It all started when he applied for the Discovery Program internship. He was offered a position as a Spring 2012 Discovery Intern after an interview with the Academic Support Coordinator of the Discovery Program. The Discovery Program is aimed to help guide students in the exploration of their many academic and career interests. Focusing on providing academic support and improving retention, the Discovery Program helps students successfully transition into and throughout their undergraduate experience while maximizing their academic potential. This establishes a strong academic and social network, creating opportunities for students to enhance the quality of their learning experience. Through a proactive approach, Discovery reaches out to students and provides a link to essential support services and extra-curricular opportunities. Discovery encourages students to cultivate educational, social and career interests and to explore ways of making meaningful contributions to society. The primary goal of the Discovery Program Internship is to allow students to gain transferable skills to be used in future employment opportunities along with training students in every facet of the Discovery Program specifically in peer advising. It prepares students for a future paid Discovery Advisor position; the Discovery student assistants, also known as Discovery Advisors (DAs), serve as a first step for students to acquire academic guidance, gain knowledge about the resources available on campus, and learn how to effectively improve in time management, study techniques, and note-taking skills. This is something that particularly interested David as he embarked on the journey of becoming a Discovery Advisor.

It was as expected. David spent a great number of his internship hours researching and learning more about HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the main markup language for web pages as well as PHP, a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages. David anticipated to become familiarized and more educated in the publishing language of the World Wide Web since he had very basic knowledge and some understanding of HTML before starting the Discovery Program Internship. During the Summer of 2011, he developed a very simplistic website for a friend using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, but that was essentially all the experience he had with HTML itself. There was hardly any time spent in learning the true essence of HTML as he was simply just following various tutorials in order to facilitate and be of an assistance to a friend of his.

The start of his internship consisted of reading documentations of HTML which was something David was not looking forward to. He wanted to go straight into the programming aspect of the project and code away. The only problem was that he had very limited knowledge of HTML and how everything worked in terms of web design. In addition, he had to wait for confirmation and be trained before doing any of the real work for the internship. During the second week of internship and Spring semester, David was required to go through two OmniUpdate training courses- both the beginners and advance sessions under the University Center for Trainig and Development. OmniUpdate is a content management system (CMS) that David had to be familiar and comfortable with since it would be his means of creating, editing, and managing and publishing content to the Web. The content management system is generally a computer application designed and done in a consistently organized manner so that everyone can modify, delete, and add pages to a website regardless of experience level. David was quite accustomed to working in OmniUpdate after taking the two training classes hosted by the Technology Training Center and taking a look at the support documentation of OmniUpdate. The real fun was about to commence.

Countless hours were spent in programming and debugging the source codes both online and offline. When it came to implementing and testing the HTML code online in OmniUpdate, various problems occurred. The HTML source editor in OmniUpdate removed all HTML script and link tags. David was not aware of this modification by OmniUpdate in his source code until it came to publishing the page to the production server and making it live to the web. He noticed that his HTML code was "leaked" onto the webpage itself and the code did not function as he expected. He was anticipating button widgets, comment boxes, and drop-down menus, but none of that was displayed on the page. at was very frustrating and took time away from working on a new page. More and more time was spent in the debugging process which was something David was not too fond of. It's true what people say: "Fix one bug in your program, and ten new bugs will appear." That's how David felt each and every day. He took it step by step though, making one change at a time and verifying that that change was permanent and did something significant in the overall code on OmniUpdate. The entire debugging process was practically trial and error, experimenting with the source code and determining what does and does not belong in the code. Soon, David crashed two webpages with his new code and had to revert the files associated the webpage back to a previous workable version. Bad code is one thing, but crashing a webpage altogether is never good. It was a frightening moment of his internship and made David do some more serious late night debugging. Eventually, David realized that some of his code within the HTML source editor was still being removed and not permanently remaining the way he wanted it to be. It took some time but he soon recognized that he needed a workaround. After researching some more online, it turns out that PHP was the "easiest" solution.

David read even more material but this time on PHP documentations and manuals / references. Soon after, he wrote PHP code which was embedded into his HTML source document. He found PHP to be very handy. It allowed him to keep his code the way it was statically but run dynamically on the webpage executing the commands the way David wanted it to initially. No doubt, OmniUpdate and all of its features was frustrating and became bothersome to use but it was something David had to deal with for his internship. OmniUpdate was by all means, the only way to maintain campus-wide websites.

David's source codes did not work precisely the way he envisioned it, but it was much better than before. For the interactive Questions and Answers section of the website, he wanted to create a PHP file that would run on the server and connect to a database storing user's questions and answers permanently. The general goal was to create a Question and Answer system where students and other visitors to the webpage can ask questions to members of the Discovery Program (the Discovery Advisors) and can receive an email reply as well as posting this information to a static webpage for future reference. This however required David to have direct access to the database. He contacted Drew Hill, the web director of the Binghamton University WebTeam, where he stated that the Web Team and the Office of University Communications and marketing's Creative Services Department does not allow root access to the server except via the CMS. Drew provided some options to build this system but none appealed to David.

He decided to take a look at the default html and pcf files that existed before the start of his internship. He observed and saw that there was a Apache-specific virtual function which performed an Apache sub-request. David referred to the online PHP manual and read that the PHP virtual function is useful for including script files and anything that required parsing though Apache, a web HTTP server software, performing the virtual command on success. He used it within his source codes and everything clicked and worked. The hard part was over and now entered the editing process.

Since then, David has been busy at working modifying the various pages and sections of the Discovery website. From the Discovery Advisors to the Contract Us, David has made the several pages much more attractive and user-friendly. A Google Calendar of all the Discover Program events was incorporated onto the main page of the website along with a social media connection links such as a Facebook badge, Facebook Like Box, and Twitter Follow button. In addition, the Discovery Advisor's biography page was cleaned up and streamlined in a consistent and uniform fashion so that each DA's profile contains the same information. The photos are in a gallery slideshow view enhancing the overall presentation design of the page itself. There are still some minor changes that need to be made with the "DABios" webpage. Taken as a whole, the website transformation is heading in the right direction. It will only be a matter of time until the website is complete and finalized for the public to see.

David expected to become more knowledgeable in web design using HTML and PHP throughout the entire internship experience. So far, he has definitely become a better web developer than before, shaping him into a more efficient and proficient programmer. His career plans for the future are still uncertain. That is one of the main incentives for taking this internship. David wanted to get a feel of all the various fields of Computer Science and down the road, eventually decide what interests him the most and makes him passionate to be a programmer. My past internship during the Winter of 2011-2012 was in the field of Software Development. This was a completely new experience and David is certainly enjoying every minute of it. He will have to wait to see what is still in store for him in the future but he positively can see this experience impacting his future career occupation whether it be in the field of web design or a profession related to it.

David still has plenty of work left regarding the Discovery Program website. He plans on including a picture of each Discovery Center on campus, creating a YouTube channel with different videos showcasing the Discovery Program and all of its resources. A plan in the making is to integrate on the website, great places to study on campus based on study environments that are most conducive to a student's needs. The "Academic And Student Success Resources" will made more assessable for users to find and utilize all the valuable resources that students are unaware of. Additionally, there will be a section on the website that informs students of professional opportunities offered by the Discovery Program as well as a blog page discussing the Discovery Program events and features.

At the conclusion of all the website related work, David will work closely with the other Discovery Program interns in promoting and advertising the Discovery Program to both students and faculty members on campus. He will continue attending his supervisor's seminar class in learning more about the Discovery Program, the history and programs associated to the six schools and colleges of Binghamton University, academic career exploration guidance, and academic advising experience and decision making strategies and techniques. This is fundamentally the objective of the Discovery Program Internship- to train us to become Discovery Advisors for the 2012-2013 academic year.

--Core 14:53, 3 May 2012 (EDT)David Lui