Library Web Chic

So the last three weeks have been rather busy. I have to give three presentations in a little less than two weeks, which means that I have been coding like crazy. First, I have pages to finish coding and testing that I am going to show as part of my presentations. I am working on an creating an RSS feed for our library's news and archiving the old news as XML as well.

Second, not being a great fan of PowerPoint, I put together my presentations in web form. I tried this for the first time a year ago and it worked well. I am using ASP and CSS to display different portions of the presentation at a time. This creates an effect similar to PowerPoint slides. In addition, I created a print stylesheet to allow visitors to easily print my presentation content. However, it has been a year since I played with this code. As a result, it took me a while to re-familarize myself with the code and get my presentations ready. One good thing was the fact that I had enough comments in my code to help me refresh myself rather quickly. This is a REALLY good example of why you should comment your code! Without the comments it would have taken me a lot longer to put things together.

The last thing I have been working on is creating a mass emailing to conference attendees announcing a program change (I am the conference technology chair). Currently, I have all the attendees emails in a database. So using ASP I wrote a page that would use the CDONTS object to send out a customized email to each conference attendee. I was able to create this my repurposing pieces of existing code. One piece which generates a mail message and another piece loops through the database and print information from a particular table. By putting these together I was able to create my mail emailing. This is definitely code I want to add to my example ASP files for future reference. All and all it has been a busy but interesting three weeks.