The site is based on Drupal and Gallery. But as you can probably tell, I really hacked them up, both on a template level and under the hood.

My goals were as follows: (1) I wanted to make it all seem like it was one site, both to viewers and to people posting on it (which meant that I made Gallery and Drupal look like each other); (2) I wanted to make it very easy for my family to use the site (which meant that I did a lot of hacking Drupal templates, and that I had to make Gallery and Drupal talk to each other); and (3) I wanted to be able to use the website to send out periodic emails to various subscription-based family and friend groups (again, a lot of hacking required to make it look nice).

Released: April 13, 2006

I've just finished a new version of my personal website. I built it with two purposes in mind. First, it had to work as a marketing vehicle for my consulting services. Second, it had to retain archived content of my old personal blog (since my new personal blog is at http://karlandangela.reeshome.org) and my poetry collection.

With that in mind, I kept the Movable Type back-end and focused on layout and interface changes. I totally rewrote the templates and style-sheets, streamlining the display of information towards my two intended audiences. Gone (I hope) is the overwhelming clutter of my original site. I believe you will find the new site much more aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

Besides design changes, I've also added alternate style sheets for different browsers and environments, as well as a special style sheet for printing. I also had to rename a lot of the files, but thanks to the miracle of htaccess, nobody (not even Google) should notice.

The site is designed primarily to work with IE6+, Firefox 1.0+, Opera 6+, and other browsers of similar modernity (yes, I'm done trying to appease Netscape 4.x). Yes, it also works on IE7 beta (though I had to change from using stylesheet hacks to using conditional stylesheet overlays to get this to work). It looks best in IE thanks to various filters and effects, but it looks pretty much the same on all browsers.

Old Release Notes: May 2003

In May of 2003, I upgraded my personal website to the Movable Type Content Management system (okay, I know it's not technically a CMS, but thanks to a lot of customization on my part, it might as well be). This has made updating my site a lot easier. You can read about my old site here.

Of course, the perfectionist within in me wasn't satisified with the default templates, so I've made a lot of customizations and hacks. These include:

• Almost entirely rewriting the HTML templates so they are more modular.
• Post-processing the generated site with PERL and regular expressions so that I can weed out a few things that aren't xhtml-compliant.
• Redesigning and rewriting the layout (twice, I might add) so that it's based entirely on CSS (try viewing the site on older or text based browsers; it's very readable).
• Generating the site as JSP instead of HTML, which allows me to throw in some JSP code on each page, such as a counter/log file and a browser-determined style sheet.
• Adding a ton of plug-ins, some of which required me to actually hack the Movable Type code (it's PERL-based--it's bringing me back to my roots) before I could get them to work the way I wanted.
• Modifying the newsfeed and front page so that they span all five sections of my site instead of just one section.

So yes, there's a ton of different web technologies working together for this site. Even my photo albums require a different technology--I hacked (basically rewrote) the XML/XSLT output templates for the Dell Image Expert program that came with my computer, which I must say is very well designed (I love the fact that its web output is XML/XSLT based), and I would actually pay money for it if it hadn't come with my computer.

Anyway, in case you haven't figured it out yet, you can get to my website by going to /home/. Enjoy.

• http://elj.byu.edu

Unfortunately, we had to strip out the easy-to-update database interface and switch back to flat files thanks to university policy.

• Web Development
• Programming
• Product Design & User Interface

You may also be interested in my undergraduate projects.

• Writing, Editing, and Publishing
• Training and Education

You may also be interested in my undergraduate writing and projects.

Legal Experience

Technical Experience

I prefer to use CSS to manage layout wherever possible, and try to avoid WYSIWYG editors. Though I favor Perl, PHP, and JSP, I am open to any scripting language. I am experienced in HTML, CSS, JSP, ASP, Perl, PHP, .NET, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, RSS, XML, and XSLT.

On the non-technical side, I like to think of myself as a pretty good designer/organizer. You could say I know how to make sure my clothes match.

Courses were typically 2-3 days long, with an occasional extra day or two for onsite consulting. The classes were typically taught to anywhere from 3 to 15 people (including managers, developers, and data specialists) onsite with the requesting company.

I also have experience developing self-tutorials online, as well as product documentation.

I also have extensive experience with editing through my experiences in the English program at BYU, as well as my experiences on the editing staffs of several University journals. You may interested in examining my undergraduate writing.

I am proficient with Framemaker, Word, and WebWorks. I also have experience with RoboHelp and JavaHelp.

You might also find my web development portfolio and college computer science projects relevant.

I offer consultation on both API and GUI design.

• Last Week's Newly Issued Utah Patent and Trademarks: this collection of scripts scrapes information off the USPTO website and builds HTML and PDF report of the latest Utah Patents and Trademarks. Uses ImageMagick and HTMLDoc.
• findnoascii.pl: this script highlights potentially non ascii files in a large directory of files (since submitting non-ascii files to the patent office is a bad idea).
• easydir.pl: this script makes it easier to make a lay-person friendly printout of a large directory of files.
• trans.pl: this script is just one of many such scripts I've used to cut down the time it takes to convert information from a text document into a spreadsheet and vice versa.

To see the Corda 6.0 documentation, click below:

• Corda 6.0 Documentation

Some of these changes reflect new product features. For example, we divided our product into three separate modules (PopChart, OptiMap, and Highwire), each of which exposed different functionality (graphing, mapping, or PDF generation) and would be purchased separately even though all of the modules were still the same product. So a big challenge was making the documentation immediately accessible to users of all three modues. Other changes reflect lessons learned about how different audiences (developers, administrators, designers, and so on) learn to use our product.

Like the PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 Documentation, I produced the documentation in two formats: PDF and HTML. The documentation is single-sourced from Framemaker 7.0, and I used a highly-modified Webworks template to convert it into the HTML version. I used conditional text and variables to produce two distinct branches of our documentation: Corda Server (our server product) and Corda Builder (our desktop product).

I list this documentation under several portfolio categories, so let me take a moment to justify each of those categories:

• Technical Writing - This should be pretty obvious. One thing that I would like to point out here is that the documentation takes a multiple-audience oriented approach, which is why there's so darn many books.
• Product Design & User Interface - In the process of writing the documentation, I became heavily involved in product design and usability review. This was mostly motivated by my desire to make the product so usable that I wouldn't need to write any documentation. Of course, that was just a pipe dream, but I still helped our development team make things less convoluted. Also, you might argue that designing the documentation interface is itself is an exercise in product design and usability--you have to figure out how to efficiently meet the educational needs of you users.
• Web Development - First off, I had to gain a knowledge of what I was documenting, and the product was a heavily web oriented product. This involved developing a number of examples for all sorts of web environments. Secondly, I had to make a lot of customizations to the WebWorks templates (which translates our FrameMaker files to HTML) to get our current look and feel. This involved a lot of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It also took a while to get it XHTML compliant.

You might also want to check out my entry on the Automated Documentation Build process, as this greatly simplifies our documentation generation.

The tricky thing about developing the courses is that we have three different products that can be used in about 8 or 9 different ways, so I've had to take a very modular approach. Not only that, but I've identified three different types of users who need to be trained on our product, so we have to make specialized courses for developers, designers, and project managers.

For the same reasons that we don't post our training material on our website (can't have people training themselves and not paying us money), I can't post much of anything here, but here's an agenda for you.

• Agenda - the links don't go anywhere since I pulled this from our training CD

Part of developing these courses is developing example applications and labs that illustrate how to use our product in various environments with various databases. The trick here is to develop an application simple enough that the student doesn't confused with irrelevant details, yet complex enough to illustrate a real-world use for our tools. Fortunately, I can post some of these on my website:

Parts of these examples won't work without a running CordaServer on your system, but at least they give you a picture of my training strategy.

• Basic OptiMap Lab
• Complex OptiMap Drilldown System Tutorial
• Quick PCXML/PCScript Overview for Upgrading Developers
• Chilisoft ASP Tutorial

Like the PopChart 4 Documentation, I produced the documentation in two formats: PDF and HTML. The documentation is single-sourced from Framemaker 7.0 (as opposed to 6.0 for PopChart 4), and I used a highly-modified Webworks template to convert it into the HTML version. I used conditional text and variables to produce three distinct branches of our documentation: PopChart, OptiMap, and PopChart+OptiMap.

I list this documentation under several portfolio categories, so let me take a moment to justify each of those categories:

• Technical Writing - This should be pretty obvious. One thing that I would like to point out here is that the documentation took a very multi-audience oriented approach for this version, which is vast improvement over the developer-oriented PopChart 4 documentation.
• Product Design & User Interface - In the process of writing the documentation, I became heavily involved in product design and usability review. This was mostly motivated by my desire to make the product so usable that I wouldn't need to write any documentation. Of course, that was just a pipe dream, but I still helped our development team make things less convoluted. Also, you might argue that designing the documentation interface is itself is an exercise in product design and usability--you have to figure out how to efficiently meet the educational needs of you users.
• Web Development - First off, I had to gain a knowledge of what I was documenting, and the product was a heavily web oriented product. This involved developing a number of examples for all sorts of web environments. Secondly, I had to make a lot of customizations to the WebWorks templates (which translates our FrameMaker files to HTML) to get our current look and feel. This involved a lot of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It also took a while to get it XHTML compliant.

You might also want to check out my entry on the Automated Documentation Build process, as this greatly simplifies our documentation generation.

To see the PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 documentation, click below:

• PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 Documentation

• Q3 2001 Newsletter
• Q4 2001 Newsletter
• Q1 2002 Newsletter

To reduce demands on my time, we moved the responsibility for newsletters to our marketing department at the beginning of 2003. However, I still have been responsible for writing technical articles and proofing other articles. And you'll notice the design really hasn't changed much from my original.

• Q1 2003 Newsletter
• Q2 2003 Newsletter
• Q3 2003 Newsletter

You can see the Corda Technologies website in its current condition at http://www.corda.com.

• Click here to see the main scripts (there's some batch files that call this script, but these are the jist of it).

I bulit the example using ASPs to interface with server-side databases (in this case, an Access database via ODBC), and client-side VBScript to interface with the Outlook API. With a few modifications this could easily hook up to an exchange server, but for demonstration purposes it makes more sense to do things on the client-side.

You can find out more about it, as well as download it's code, from http://www.corda.com/examples/go/cordaoutlook/frameset.asp.

Update (Jan 16th, 2003): As I've been looking at my logs since this page was spidered by Google last week, I've been shocked by the number of people coming to this site searching for this or similar applications. Several people have even inquired about custom Outlook programming jobs. So I thought I'd just make it known that I am perfectly willing to take on contracts for customized Outlook programming jobs. Just send the specs to customoutlookjobs@karlrees.com and I'll get back to you with a quote.

Hopefully, within the next month or so, I'll get some time to put up a website advertising this service.

I have 5+ years of experience in the industry, from building data reporting systems to website design to batch scripting. I have been coding for much longer--since my dad first brought home a Commodore 64 in the 80s. Likewise, I have been building web pages since I first got online in college (back when Netscape was still #1). I am detail-oriented, as evidenced in my preference to edit code directly instead of surrendering the code to a WYSIWYG.

Between my B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, freelance web projects (such as the site you are viewing), and my work with Corda Technologies, I have developed an extensive skill set, proving time and time again my adaptability to new technologies.

I am registered to practice before United States Patent & Trademark Office as Patent Attorney No. 58983.

I earned my Juris Doctorate from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2007. While there, I concentrated my studies on Intellectual Property (including Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks), Telecommunications, and Antitrust. I served as Executive Editor of the BYU Education and Law Journal.

While at BYU, I became proficient with HotDocs legal document authoring software. As may therefore be expected, I also provide services related to HotDocs.

I have experience providing editing, writing, research, and on-line help services in many fields, with particular expertise in technical writing. Having earned degrees in both English and Computer Science, I excel at breaking the technical down to its essential elements and translating those elements for the masses.

From my experiences editing journals, writing patents, and producing award-winning documentation for Corda Technologies, I developed proficiency in Framemaker, Word, and Webworks, with some experience in Robohelp.

CordaBuilder, by the way, is a graphical design tool for graphs and maps. It can produce static output, but is more often used in conjuction with CordaServer to create template files for dynamically generated graphs and maps.

You can see CordaBuilder in action by downloading the PopChart+OptiMap package from the Corda Technologies website, and running CordaBuilder.

Though most of the coding has been done by members of our programming team, I conceived of, designed, coded, and currently maintain the JavaScript embedder by myself. I also have been involved in coding the Java Tag Library and ASP.NET embedders.

Finally, for documentation and training, I have developed numerous example data visualization web applications in all of the listed environments illustrating how to use the Corda Embedder. These applications typically connect to a MySQL database or an ODBC data source.

You can see the Corda Embedder in action by downloading Corda Technologies' PopChart+OptiMap package and following the instructions in the Quick Start guide.

I produced the documentation in two formats: PDF and HTML. The documentation is single-sourced from Framemaker 6.0, and I use a highly-modified Webworks template to convert it into the HTML version. I produced several different versions of this documentation for some minor revisions and for some OEM clients.

The PopChart 4.0 documentation is no longer available on the Corda Technologies website, but I've mirrored it here:

• PopChart 4

• Literary Criticism

• College Computer Science Projects

The site is no longer functioning, but you can read a little about the history of this project, as well as find the source code, by clicking here.

Ideally, this project was going to turn into a full-fledged content management system, but this proved too ambitious. I abandoned the project for a much more robust Movable Type engine (i.e. my current site). I regret moving away from an XML base, but I do enjoy the convenience of a full-fledged content management system.

These organizations included:

• Honors Student Advisory Council
• English Society
• English 345 (Film as Literature) Web Site
• Writers' Guild

Since then, these organizations have gone through several website revisions, so it no longer makes sense to link to them. The websites were written in HTML, using CSS for style. The mail subscription scripts and counters were written in PERL. The Writers' Guild site also had a web-based posting and comment section for writings by members of the group. I wrote this in PERL, as well.

The link below describes what it does and even lets you try it out if you still have an old Eudora mailbox:

• Eudora Conversion Utility

• Evaluation of the Secret Shopper Model for the Web