My wife is a licensed land surveyor. She used an old c based console program to perform two dimensional coordinate transformations. This program required a carefully crafted text file as input in the same folder that the program resides. When run, it would produce a text file output in that same folder. In other words, she had a copy of this program in every project folder that required a coordinate transformation. Granted, this was an extremely small program, so the multiple copies didn't take up much space. After many years of use, computer upgrades rendered this program useless, and she didn't have access to the source code. She asked if I could create an updated application for her. Continue reading

A few months back, I finally decided to develop a personal website to provide a blogging platform and to showcase my project experience. I had acquired JacobMDavidson.com more than a year ago, and realized it was time to do something with it when it came up for renewal. The first step was to choose a platform. I chose to use GitHub Pages with Jekyll for this task. Continue reading

During the spring of 2012, I helped my brother develop a website for his business. His site was developed in WordPress, and he needed to add eCommerce functionality. We chose to add this functionality with the relatively new WooCommerce plugin for WordPress. For credit card payments, he opened an account with Elavon, and subscribed to Elavon's Converge service (formerly known as Virtual Merchant). He hoped to integrate this service into his WooCommerce powered site, but a Converge payment gateway was not available at the time. I chose to personally develop this plugin for him using the WooCommerce Payment Gateway API, and the Converge Developer Guide Continue reading

I needed to find a way to attract a professional engineering audience for the Professional Engineering License Manager. Furthermore, I needed to cultivate this audience with minimal financial investment. Simply targeting specific keywords for the professional engineering management system, and using SEO to attract users was not an option. Engineers were simply not searching for similar tools. Through keyword research I discovered that the phrases “civil pe” and “civil pe license” were frequently searched, and these phrases had low to moderate competition. From this research, CivilPE.net was born as a means to generate the target audience I coveted. Continue reading

While working on a site that made heavy used of lightboxes to display images and image galleries, the client requested the ability to display a featured video. They wanted this video to be displayed with a thumbnail in a widget area. At the time, there were plenty of YouTube video channel plugins, but I couldn't find any with lightbox capabilities. Using prettyPhoto, I developed this widget. Continue reading