KaiSchaller.com

After a formidable amount of brainstorming I’ve finally put together an acceptable capstone proposal and am only 1 more faculty signature away from approval.

I will be developing a plugin for WordPress that adds mailing list functionality to the interface. The goal is to make it really easy for people with WordPress to create and manage a mailing list without having to deal with database and server-side code creation. This plugin is being developed specifically for our state representatives website, but I think I should be able to submit it to the WordPress Plugin Directory without rewriting any code.

I have until roughly Thanksgiving to get everything completed, wish me luck!

I’m currently continuing (well, starting, rather) development on a website for my computer science capstone project. I won’t have to present the finished product until sometime in late November (tentative), but it’ll be good to get a head start during the month of August, when I don’t have many obligations. The site is being built completely from scratch. I’ll be utilizing Photoshop, XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and Javascript/AJAX, so it’s definitely a big undertaking. The site will include both a front and back end. More to come later, I’m sure.

I’ve been mildly interested in the Facebook API since its release. Heck, I even wrote down a few ideas of applications that might prove handy. My most recent thought was, “hey, I bet a ton of my Facebook friends have websites that I don’t even know about!” So instead of clicking each of the 100+ profiles individually I considered writing a web app that would retrieve the information for me.

Sadly, after exploring the API documentation, it doesn’t seem like this is possible. I can get my hands on all kinds of information — name, address, status, interests, etc. — but there is no mention of having access to the “website” field. Bah!

I could probably look into this matter further since my research up to this point consists of a quick skim and CTRL+F-ing the documentation… but for now I shall put the idea on hold.