This page contains samples of Nick LaPrell's professional and private work. Additional information can be found at the following links:
Craigslist Job Feed Aggregator
The Craigslist Job Feed Aggregator makes it easy to check Tech and Creative job listings from nearly 40 US cities on a single page. The categories and cities are scalable within the code. Listings are ordered and sectioned off by date. Each listing links to the original listing on Craigslist and has an expandable details section
The feeds are retrieved using AJAX and cached locally on the server to reduce load time. Clicking on "Fetch Current Feeds" link in the control bar retrieves the current listings for each city under the selected category and reloads the listings.
The Advanced Search feature filters the locally cached listings for the current selected category further. Listings can be filtered by date, city, and keywords.
The keyword search routine is capable of filtering listings by required keywords (denoted with a "+"), restricted keywords (denoted with a "-"), and literal searchs. Example: "new page" +coder -designer will return only results that contain "coder", do not contain "designer" and may contain "new page."
The jQuery JavaScript Library was used for all visual effect and to make the AJAX calls.
Animation Factory Purchase Page
This project was a complete redesign of an awkward five page purchase flow on Animation Factory. I updated the purchase page and shopping cart into a single page with an intuitive and interactive layout. jQuery was used extensively for animations and effects. The rest of the site was updated with a floating shopping cart widget. Form validation was also updated to include on-the-fly AJAX validation of the username and VAT Tax ID.
To accommodate existing infrastructure, the cart was converted to a cookie based entity using the jQuery cookie plugin I designed (available in the Code Library). I wrote an additional cart plugin to act as a layer between the UI and the cookie plugin. This plugin manages discount codes as well and normalizes cart products to add or remove discount codes based on the user state.
This design is not yet live, but an interactive demonstration page is available here.
Code Library
Snippets of some of my most often used code can be found in my Online Code Library. Code includes basic PHP and JavaScript functions, as well as jQuery plugins. Included in the jQuery plugins is my jquery.pluginLoader.js platform that loads jQuery plugins dynamically and maintains a list of current plugins loaded.
Beta Central
Beta Central is the website used to facilitate public testing of AOL beta software. It was designed with strict UI requirements and color scheme requirement. The site is rendered through two key files using a custom designed HTML rendering class written in PHP. Back-end tools (not available to view) were designed to manage content publishing on the site through file writing (a database was not available). The drag and drop windows (Speak Out > Contact us) were custom built using an open source drag script. Other interface elements use the Dojo Toolkit.
AOL Pictures API Class (PHP)
This class was written to provide easy access to the AOL Pictures API through PHP. It contains a method for each available API calls, as well as an experimental class that pulls in all available photo album data for a given user.
Note: AOL has discontinued their AOL Pictures service, so this class is no longer functional and only serves as an example class for a photo album API.
HTML Validation Class (PHP)
As I worked on content management components, there was constantly a need to allow for custom HTML. Typos and invalid markup could pose problems for the site, however, so I designed this class to solve that. It uses Tidy to validate HTML snippets. It can be used as a second set of eyes to prevent bad HTML code from getting through without the need to sanitize the code. Note: this class ensures W3C compliance for HTML and XHTML. It does NOT protect against malicious code.
Utility Functions (PHP)
The functions that I have designed and most frequently use are stored in this library. They are mostly string and array manipulation functions. They have saved quite a bit of time and serve to help put some complex operations into a simple perspective.
Bible Citation Class (PHP)
The Bible Citation class was an exercise in text matching. It processes raw text and locates Bible verse citations, including abbreviations and multiple citation formats. The text is then returned in HTML format with links to each verse on Bible Gateway in the specified translation. Links are also assigned multiple HTML classes which can be used for styling particular categories (such as Old Testament citations).