I’m allowed to brag a bit, right?
Word came via email that a WordPress site I built last year for BC Corrections (hosted by and working with folks the Justice Institute of British Columbia) won a bronze prize from the Horizon Interactive Awards.
I wrote several posts about the making of the BC Corrections Leadership site:
Sometime in early 2019 I heard from the project manager, Al, that he submitted the for an award. “Oh, that’s nice, I thought.” Then, Al emailed last week with the bronze news, this site did win an award in the Training/E-Learning category.
That’s very nice.
It’s at listed there under the “C” winners:
So there were some 800 entries for Horizon Interactive Awards in 2018. And it looks like a lot of awards are given out across like 30 categories. But it still means something, right?
I am proud of the way my colleague Peter and I could build upon a metaphor of maps and terrains and what functionality I could wrangle of the WordPress Total theme, some plugins for creating reusable blocks of content as well as Advanced Custom Fields, and a free contact form plugin that I could pass some parameters to prefill fields. I got a lot of JIBC CTLI support from Dennis Yip, especially for dealing with plugin requests and uploading of static content to a hosted web directory.
Still, the best part of this project was designing the CorrLeader Navigator — something that was barely a wish from the project spec for a means to make easily available what was new on the site:
The idea is that the WordPress API is used to populate this mini HTML site with JSON driven data snapshot for all the content (it’s about 1Mb of data but it’s cached on the static site), and a means for any visitor to filter the content by categories and resource type. The secret sauce is that it can save these preferences on your device without leaving a single, trackable cookie; it’s all local storage, which never leaves the device.
I kind of thought this would be of a lot of interest, but maybe I never really explained it well enough. I tried.
But even without it being noticed, for me it was a valuable exercise to build (and I owe Tom a thanks again for help with the ajax requests).
While the project wrapped up in late November and likely much leadership development put on the racks for this ________ pandemic, there has been interest, and for the last two months I have gotten some work adding a set of new resources and self-paced training modules on the site.
It’s all bronzy!
Featured Image: Most definitely not the most kosher re-use, but I fall on the knees of parody and obvious non-commercial use of a Monopoly game card, remixed to change the message of the “You Won 2nd Prize in a Beauty Contest: Collect $10” found in some forgotten corner of pinterist.
I recall some of the early explorations you did with this project, and it’s been an exciting one to watch grow from afar. Congrats on the bronze! Well deserved.