The last two months I have been pretty busy with a project, constructing a website for the daily English newspaper, New Age [The first was making the 1di site and should be credited in serving as a portfolio to get me this work]. The focus of the project has been on Bangladesh Elections.

The project has been advertised in not only via New Age’s newspaper, but also in the websites of Prothom Alo, BD Jobs, AND facebook. If you haven’t came across it, you can see it live here.

The entire site was made with Wordpress, but for the interactive map, as well as some other stuff, I used various open source softwares and JavaScript libraries. It has been a learning experience as well, allowing me to learn cURL, SimpleXML, etc. etc. I won’t bore you with the details. From a users perspective, the selling point of this "product" has been the maps. So I took at as a challenge to do the entire thing in JavaScript and not flash, so anyone without a Flash plug-in can use it. Overall, i think it wasn’t a bad choice. (a note aside, i *can’t* do flash, yet).

The best part about the entire project was scaring The Daily Star to publish their redesigned website. More people read Daily Star over New Age, and the fact is, they made their redesign live the day after New Age started advertising my site (most links in their so-called new site are still not working). Two days later, they published their own, sucky, interactive map. Even a computer illiterate can tell it was done in a hurry, with both their new site not working properly and their map having fundamental mistakes. Actually, I found the map they used was *cough*borrowed*cough* from Wikipedia!.

Another good thing about this one was working with another development team, Somewhere In... Let me tell you, they have a KILLER office, including a table tennis board in the conference room! It was that awesome.

It’s been a good year.

I knew about One Degree Initiative during my years in high school but only as far as it was a cooked by my classmates and friends and seemed to be destined to die off at the end of their years in Mastermind, when everyone will be shipped to different parts of the world. That, however, was not the case, as I overheard some of their members talking about expanding so the organization they helped build to continue their legacy even after they moved on. It was then that I learned they are looking for someone to build them a website.

I jumped in. I was experimenting with Joomla! and this would be an excellent opportunity to test as well as prove my skills to my peers. A few weeks later, after my GCE A Levels were done with, I officially joined 1di.

Eventually I learned that 1di is more than idle fantasy of people who had nothing better to do. These people were the ones with vision about helping those who needed it, and were committed in doing so. The “team” was built up of teens from all over Dhaka city, from students of different schools I was so familiar with, and from those of which I never even heard of.

Another few weeks later, I finished a working prototype of the 1di site, and with little improvements, published it in an evening of Eid-ul-Fitr. Glued together with different Joomla! components, the finished product looked seamless and met all the criteria I was given, but with obvious room for improvement.

And here it is, my first community website for One Degree Initiative. Although I took it upon myself to maintain it, the site is moderated by people more dedicated to the organization. I will however, of course, keep improving the site as 1di grows more and more

While working on my GCE O Level Computing Coursework (which I dropped in the last moment, sadly), I came up with the idea of exporting databases to other different formats. The idea was not new, of course, but I was still learning VB6, and my main tutor, Planet Source Code, did not have a module I could use. Hence, I made one.

This is a class module, and not a program, so only VB6 developers can actually use it. The module allows anyone with a proper ADODB Recordset to export it in three formats- CSV, HTML, or Microsoft Excel (xls). The class comes complete with functions that ease it’s use, including events that are called in various parts of the code to allow complete control for the developer.

Since I published it (which was a long time ago), the project has been featured in Code of The Day, and later, Code of The Month in PSCode.

You can download the entire source, including a demo, from Planet Source Code.