Information
I built most of the websites showcased here using Drupal, a popular, PHP-based content management system. I like Drupal because it is designed to enable developers to add additional functionality by writing their own PHP modules. Website developers have taken advantage of this by writing literally thousands of modules that are now available as free downloads from the "contrib" section of Drupal's website. I've used other people's contrib modules to quickly add functionality to websites including audio podcasting, videos, maps, and bilingual translation assistance (English/Chinese).
I have written several Drupal modules myself and have added two of them to Drupal contribs: the E-Publish and Interwiki modules, both of which I describe in the examples above.
- The "interwiki" filter provides a simplified, wiki-like syntax for linking to articles or search results on many commonly-used internet reference websites, such as Wikipedia. I discuss it in the video about my PRWatch.org website.
- The "E-publish" module helps organize a group of web pages into an online version of a periodical publication, such as a newspaper, magazine or newsletter. I show an example in my discussion of the website for Working Capital for Community Needs (the third example in this gallery).
I have also written other Drupal modules entirely for in-house use, such as "emailbot," a module that automatically generates a formatted email message once per week for mailing to the 30,000 people who have subscribed to receive email bulletins from the Center for Media and Democracy. (I have considered sharing it as well with the rest of the Drupal community, but it does a lot of visual styling specific to our website, and I think this makes it too specialized to be useful for others.)
In addition to Drupal, I've used Mediawiki (the software that powers Wikipedia) to create SourceWatch, a community-edited encyclopedia of the people, players and issues shaping the public agenda. SourceWatch is the second example in this gallery.
Each video in the gallery is about five minutes long. If you don't have time to watch them all, make sure to at least check out my brother Kenny Rampton's website (the last example in the gallery). He's a trumpet player, and I think you'll enjoy the music.