James Chevalier A Little About A Lot

About

So, my name is James Chevalier and I'm a technology & music enthusiast that's learning PHP, MySQL, jQuery (and just about anything else I can get my head around) by working on various projects that I think up.

Projects

Jimbalaya - This is where I host all of my music, which is typically a downbeat cut & paste collage of sound made in Ableton Live.  I put together mixes, produce my own tracks, and create tracks on-spec for other people's mixes, dance classes, or yoga classes, etc.  The site runs on WordPress and uses a stock theme.

C.R.U.S.H. - This is the civic engagement group in Holyoke, MA that I'm a founding member of.  I've been handling the group's online presence by maintaining the website, taking a major role in Holyoke's social network that we've created on Ning, running the Twitter account, and helping with the Facebook group, among other things.  This site runs on WordPress and uses a stock theme.

Aaron Vega - I put together and help maintain Aaron Vega's website which exists to aid in his run for an At Large seat on Holyoke's City Council.  I've put in the time and effort to create the site to a point where Aaron has been able to update it on his own with little to no knowledge of the back-end software involved.  Additionally, I make sure he is educated in what's needed to properly maintain a web presence by answering any questions & providing him with hints, tips, and suggestions along the way.  This site runs on WordPress and uses a stock theme.

Fluxels - The goal is to pull images from the internet as they're uploaded, shrink them down to 1x1 pixel, and fill the screen... all live.  The current design is a modified version of a free template I found online, and all of the code (which will change as I iterate through releases) has been made possible by documentation that's littered throughout the internet.

qabic - This is a live Q&A webapp that I'm working on.  I've had one real-world test run at Harvard which went well, but a lot has changed in API-land that I need to catch up with.  The webapp provides three screens:

1. The stage screen which displays the top few questions as voted on by the audience (either physically present or online) as well as the speaker or a moderator.  This screen has a magnified & streamlined UI (as compared with the main general-visitor screen) in order to be as relevant and readable as possible.
2. The speaker's (and/or moderator's) screen which displays the top few questions that also allows the speaker/moderator to vote.  Their vote is much more heavily weighted, immediately pushing their choices either to the top or the bottom depending on the nature of the question.  This screen also has a magnified & streamlined UI so that the speaker can get to pending questions as swiftly and naturally as possible.
3. The main general-visitor screen which displays a stream of submitted questions (either from the site itself or pulled in via hashtag from Twitter), along with voting on each question. This also allows some sorting of the questions (latest, best, and worst), along with an infinite scroll for easy navigation.

How I Can Help You

Head on over to my contact page & get in touch - let's talk a bit about your project & see if I can help.

Oh, and if you want to set up your own blog on your own domain name, go ahead and get $50 off your order at DreamHost and let me know how it goes!