The Mind of a Web Developer: An Illustrated Diagram
Matt, Mingle2, June 13, 2007

The Mind of a Web Developer

humor, programming, web development Hide

Since July I’ve been working on a large web dashboard project for Tri-County Mental Health Services in Lewiston, Maine. It’s been fun learning their business and working with the great people there. Although the project is moving more slowly than I’d like, progress is good and I think it looks nice. It will certainly be simpler to maintain than their manually generated legacy Excel spreadsheets. Not only do the charts tell stories about the business impossible with tabular data, they will see significant reductions in the amount of time spent generating their business analysis tools.

The user is able to not only change the date range, but also toggle the display of each individual metric series on each chart, including goals for each. The interactive changes are made dynamically, without requiring a page load. Kinda cool, eh?

The data is culled from disparate data sources and aggregated into a Microsoft SQL Server database I designed. Some of the data is entered via web-based forms I also developed. The server side code is written in PHP and the client-side scripting, obviously, is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I make heavy use of the jQuery JavaScript Library and the flot plotting library. All data is sent from the server to the client in the JSON data-interchange format.

Site navigation is done utilizing CSS lists and the fixed zoom buttons–which change the range of all charts on the page simultaneously–use a single CSS sprite image technique.

There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m having a great time.

TCMHS Web Dashboard

January 26, 2010 – While there is much to be done on the web dashboard, there is not enough money to do it. Today my contract is over and, unfortunately, it has not been extended. Here are a couple screenshots of the product as of today.

TCMHS Web Dashboard - AGENCY

TCMHS Web Dashboard - ADULT

css, flot, javascript, jquery, php, sql server, web development, webdev Hide