Coding & Projects

 

Select a project name on the right to view details. The majority of works are web-based and/or involve coding; however, several are not programming projects.

Avatarlog

  • http://avatar.starried.net (2005 - present)
  • Primarily PHP & MySQL, with a focus on user management, data mining, data storage optimization and user interface/usability

My main large-scale coding project is a website called "Avatarlog" that began in 2005 and has currently attained over 50,000 registered users.

This website caters to the audience generated by the popular gaming website Neopets.com. On Neopets, players can collect icons called "avatars" which are obtained by accomplishing various feats (e.g. a high score in a game, obtaining "x" items on the site, etc).

Avatarlog invites users to register and maintain a checklist of avatars that they have obtained on the Neopets.com website. The checklist feature allows for visitors to easily sort through which avatars they already have and which they still need to get. Additionally, "indepth guides" provide information on avatars, and a variety of add-on tools to help users attain said avatars.

Interactive Flashcards System

This flexible flashcard system was built in PHP and MySQL from scratch. Store vocabulary or conceptual terms, then sort data by keyword, category or lecture number. I could easily test myself by randomizing the flashcards and "flip" them back and forth.

Submit forms allow you to submit single or multiple terms into the system. Both have "smart autofill" that tries to guess your new term's category or topic based on flashcards that were previously submitted.

Web Calendar

A lightweight PHP calendar with the ability to save, edit and remove events. Can display any month since Unix epoch and stores data in a database table. Uses cookies to authenticate user and save display preferences.

Multiple themes can be applied, using a dynamic CSS stylesheet served by PHP.

DMD Application Portfolio

For my college application to the Digital Media Design program at Penn, I chose to submit an artistic portfolio in the form of a website. The design is simple and clean (though the markup could use some tidying!). The individual pages are streamlined, in terms of hyperlink location and style, for minimal interruption of the visitor's interactive flow through the pieces of artwork.

Research: Analysis of Character Portrayal in Narration

  • Project Main Page (2007)
  • Audacity and Praat for audio analysis; MySQL and PHP for statistical processing

As my final project for LING 001, I chose to analyze Richard Poe's narration of the novel "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown. I looked specifically at how Poe differentiated characters from one another when narrating dialogue, with particular focus on speech rate and phonetic pitch. Were female characters narrated higher in pitch? What about faster? Were "sad" lines always spoken at a slower rate?

My data came from 168 samples of character speech from the audio recording. I compiled my findings into a chart of raw data (generated by PHP and MySQL), several tables and graphs of processed data, and a paper stating my conclusions.

Multiplayer Puzzle Events

As a moderator on the Neoitems.net forums, I have written five cross-domain multiplayer puzzles for the members of the forum. Two are "logic puzzles" in which players must use the provided clues to deduce which set of factors go together. The other three are "web quests" where players are given the first clue, and must solve it and follow a chain of clues until they reach the conclusion of the quest.

Both types of puzzle go across domains, forcing players to search in unlikely places for clues and solve them by various methods (decryption of codes, using a Google search, manipulating images, contacting a pre-arranged "accomplice" to receive a message, etc).

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