John Gavin, 1999 - present
www.AtlanticSeabreeze.com

Designed to serve fans of East Coast, Celtic and Country music bands and singers. Provides information as to where they are performing, new recordings, news, special events and other pertinent material.

Technologies Used:

Server Side:

• Active Server Pages
• MS Access Database
• VBScript
• OLE DB Provider for Jet (various flavours as they were upgraded over the years)
• ActiveX Data Objects
• SQL

Public Client Side:

• Works with major browsers
• Javascript
• Ajax
• HTML
• DHTML
• Experimented with sending suitable content to cell phones using XHTML MP

Private/Administration (Content Management System) Client Side:
Started with working only in Internet Explorer but over time changing pages as necessary to allow FireFox to be used.
Initially:

• VBScript
• DHTML
• ActiveX Controls

Recently:

• Javascript
• DHTML
• HTML Controls
• Ajax

This was the first website I did utilizing a database for the storage of a website's contents. It came about when I happened to walk into 'down east' gift shop & gallery one day and saw this newsletter called Atlantic Seabreeze. Being a curious person, I flipped through it.

I saw stories about musicians and events and the dates and places where they were playing. The proverbial light bulb went off and I realized that this could be something that a database would be suitable for and a website could be used to access the information.

I took a copy of the newsletter home and set about creating an Access 97 database for it. As a first step I set up tables to hold some basic information: music groups, venues and times. Then I set up some sample web pages to retrieve the information from the database. When I had something working, I called the owner of the newsletter, John Gavin, and explained what I had done and asked him to drop by to see.

When John saw what I had done and I explained what was possible with a website, he gave the goahead to continue what I had started and find an ISP to host the site.

I added an administration side to allow John and myself to add play dates and articles.

I also set up a way to allow musicians to add and change their own play dates and profile information.

The hope was that over time, there would be people adding content from coast to coast. There are about 200 groups doing this now.

As time went on, I would add new features such as:

• letting John add messages to the Start page without me having to program it
• being able to look at play dates on certain days in certain regions
• used XHTML MP to allow play dates to be accessed from a cell phone
• which groups had play dates for the upcoming month
• which venues had bands/events for the upcoming month
• who's playing today
• who's playing tomorrow
• who's playing any day
• adding music clips
• emailed newsletter
• access archives

The site can be administered by non-techies - adding new material and updating material - adding features over time to enable this to be done. My job was to eliminate my part in being part of the day to day operations.

Set up signup for an emailed newsletter.

Set up procedures and scripts to allow the extraction of material to generate the emailed newsletter. Each newsletter is customized for a subscriber to include only those events taking place in their province.

Continued responsibility: to keep an eye on things - adding features.