Eventicitis

As I clean up my web site directory, 14 years of accumulated stuff, I start wondering just how many web sites I had set up for our offices’ various projects and events. Not to be horn blowing, but I am staggered to see that I found 260 different event web sites dating back mostly to the late 1990s.

In the early days, these were hand spun HTML, lots of table tags, and pretty much static information. Around 200, when I picked up PHP, I came up with a series of scripts I could more or less copy/paste to do online event registration using static text files. These worked well for capturing registration, sending emails to participants, providing exports to our staff’s FileMaker databases, but there was continual minor changes on every iteration. Moreover, by being essentially separate little database, we had no way to do overall stats, and worse, for each event, a participant would keep having to re-enter their name, college, phone, department, etc.

So in August of this year, I rolled out a database managed system where once a person registers for one of our events, the next time, they just enter their email (we fetch their contact info from the database), and registration is just a once click deal. Plus they get email confirmations, with links they can use to self cancel their registration.

Still, the event details, agendas, sometimes extra resources, mean that beyond registration, every different web site had some to a huge amount of customization. For my own vanity sake, and maybe for an extra boost of Google points, I have listed the big pile below.

Among my personal favorites, though, are:

American College Dance Festival Association’s Southwest Regional Festival 2004 where I really got to do a complete CSS, and a whole raft of backe end database, including forms for participants to select from an array of classes held during the conference
Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival more or less a copy of above, with other sorts of database driven calendar features
Ocotillo Retreat 2005 — was our most well attended of the events (was it really the iPod door prize?), we had 2 great speakers, the presentations, asssignments of demos, and the agenda where all database driven.
Ocotillo Learning Spaces Day 2005 — toyed with del.icio.us powered sidebars and resources, but the big one was creating our own mini version of “flickr” (not really) so our colleges could upload, share, and comment on some 260 photos.
Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom LearnShop — mainly because I am in awe of the workshop my colleagues pull off and the powerful stories our participants create, plus we’ve been posting examples available for viewing by streaming video or iPod download/podcast formats.
Southwest Regional Learning Communities Conference 2002 — an opportunity to break some new designs; there was something built for submissions but I cannot recall what it was
Technology by the (Discipline) Slice Dialogue Day (2002) — I pushed the idea of creating a session where we could share technology by discipline area; we even took the metaphor far enough the next year that lunch was by the slide too (pizza). Built some crude PHP forms for posting/sharing examples.