Pong Line App
Alright, fantastic 3AM/avoiding essay app idea. It's an easy way of keeping track of line. The basic goal is that it makes it super quick and easy to add people to line for pong and rearrange them.
DartmouthRoomSearch.com
I picked up the domain for 9 bucks and transferred the website to there. dartmouth.alexbeals.com redirects there now. Probably should have done that before releasing, but ah well, it's done now.
Dartmouth Room Search - Visuals
I quickly did some visuals, and ended up with this 'passable' work:
It worked, to be sure...but it didn't look GOOD. The first major problem was the color scheme. I'm not sure why I went with the blue, but I realized that I probably should have gone with Dartmouth colors. I went to the Dartmouth website, and took the main color. It looks like this: . Now I need a color palette. First off, this site details the process of generating shades of the color you have (note 20% grey = 10% black). I also needed a complementary color, and from the same website observed this link to making a color palette. It utilizes a program called ColorScheme Studio, the free trial version can be downloaded from online. To activate it, you can (hypothetically) use the information located here. I fully support buying it, however.
Dartmouth Room Search - Locating
I had all of the data, and I had it in an easily searchable MySQL database. Now, I had to figure out the best way to access it. I contemplated just having a bunch of search boxes, but that was quickly crossed out. It needed to be intuitive, and there were too many categories. I then thought maybe having sliders for the number of people and rooms, and the standard dropdown/checkboxes for the other values. Again, I vetoed this for something easier to grasp immediately.
Dartmouth Room Search - Sprint
I realized two days ago that there wasn't at all a good way to find rooms that fit your desires for upperclassmen housing. I contacted the housing office, and inquired as to if they had access to data about all of the rooms. Unfortunately, all they had was access to the same outdated floor plans that anyone could access. Sighing, I started looking through all of the PDF's to see if there was an easy way to extract the data. The links to the PDF's are scattered across pages, with differing numbers depending on what floors there are. I noticed they have a similar address pattern: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~orl/images/floor-plans-06/<first four characters of building name>-<floor number (0-4).pdf. I quickly got the building names by copying them all and running a quick strip, and then using the requests python module to check if the pdf file existed and then downloading it. You can check out the very easy download script here, on my Github.
How QR Codes Work
For the Dartmouth Redesign, I wanted a way to turn the DiD (a seven character alphanumeric that identifies you) into an attractive QR code. This got me wondering into how QR codes work. Turns out, there are very few easily accessible resources on it. This is what I found:
Dartmouth ID Redesign
Now, I've done a fair amount of work in regards to the Dartmouth ID, but mainly in terms of duplicating/replicating it. I've made a fair amount of progress, and you can see some of the early work and the updates by clicking on the links. However, this article is about a possible redesign on the current ID. This is what the current ID look like.
Dartmouth Banner Redesign - Part 2 (Specific Breakdown)
Financial Aid Menu
Financial Aid Adjustment Survey Request
There are no currently available surveys.
Dartmouth Banner Redesign - Part 1 (The Problems)
Dartmouth currently uses an Ellucian product called Banner for the 'Student Information System'. From a UI standpoint, it's a nightmare. From a UX standpoint, it's even worse. First of all, the URL. The URL to access banner is https://banner.dartmouth.edu/banner/groucho/twbkwbis.P_WWWLoginWEBAUTH. One would think that https://banner.dartmouth.edu would redirect, and be a lot easier. But instead, that redirects to a 403 Forbidden page.
When you finally get to the site, you're greeted with this 'beautiful' and totally useful landing page.
The 'Help' link brings up a popup window that just says click on the Menu. The 'Site Map' link brings up the same menu options as clicking 'Undergraduate Student Main Menu'. Clicking that brings up one of the worst menus.
You'll notice that the links are almost in alphabetical order, which is infuriating. Now, a lot of these links aren't applicable, or available at certain times. The main ones are the following:
Router Setup
The way that I use my router is basically as an ethernet splitter, and to make my own wifi signal. In case anyone else has multiple devices in their room that need ethernet, this is a rough guide of how to set it up. These instructions are for the router I have, which is the Linksys WRT54G.
