Max Starkenburg

Academic Commons

Responding to a need to provide a central hub that connects students to the variety of available but disconnected academic services and resources, the Academic Commons was created.

Visit the site

In helping to build its web presence, I:

• mocked up multiple design possibilities
• wrote custom Drupal 8 theme code (including Sass stylesheets, JavaScript interface features, Twig templates and Drupal hooks in PHP for custom appearances and behaviors)
• created a custom Drupal module to support requirements in the admin interface
• researched, installed, and configured other Drupal 8 contributed modules for interface and content-editing needs
• configured Taxonomies, Content Types, and Views to ease future site maintenance
• conducted multiple rounds of QA testing and assisted with debugging

Study space finder

Allowing students to find study spaces all over GW campuses, our department built this website, using it as an opportunity to start getting our hands dirty with Drupal 8.

Given the complexity of features, data, interactivity, and other variables involved, I was proactive early on in marshaling requirements and wishlists from a variety of disparate stakeholders, including students, developers, content editors, and managers. My efforts provided groundwork for requirements specification, scope and sprint planning, database design and maintainability, and interface design, dramatically decreasing the number of unknowns that otherwise would have plagued implementation and delayed deadlines....

Library website modernization

In addition to writing CSS and JavaScript to bring the Drupal 7 site into line with the university's more modern and less crowded look-and-feel, I designed and coded new components to break up the text-heavy design of the old site (seen at left) and restore focus and ease of navigation to our most important and sought-after services via design elements that tested most successfully in the usability studies we ran.

The new design led to an increase in new catalog searches.

Visit the site

Visit the maps

In addition to being able to mouse over the maps and have information about buildling features appear, the maps were built to allow for users to click a link next to the call number in the catalog and be directed to exactly where in the building their book is located.

Math mini-editor

Displaying math on the web is tricky, let alone editing it. This widget incorporated the JavaScript built by the good folks at ASCIIMath, which converts a simple mathematical mark-up language to MathML. As the user writes ASCIIMath in an in-place miniature editor, the output display is produced in real time. A "cheat sheet" was built to show common encodings.

Accessible and attributed images

An important aspect of the editor was nudging authors to include text for the benefit of users who rely on screen readers, as well as to provide attribution for the image's creator. Both of these aspects were tightly woven into the workflow.

Textbook elements that talk to each other

A key question of the editor was how to add semantic elements like Examples, Exercises, Notes, Equations, etc., that would not just share a respective format, but provide features like automated numbering, automated index generation, answer sets, and collated glossaries. These animations show three different ways an author could add a Definition to their text. Subtleties of their functionality were the subject of multiple usability studies. Read a report of one here (PDF).

I: Connexions homepage (the early years)

For the longest time, the homepage of Connexions, a repository and authoring environment of open educational resources, didn't alter in style from the default CMS underlying its architecture. Some changes in colors spruced things up a bit, but didn't resolve the problem of being too reliant on text and subject to peculiarities of the CMS....

Iterative ideas

How to add options on a webpage to download its PDF, download its ZIP, add it to various bookmarks, send it to the printer, order a printed copy, rate it, e-mail its authors, edit it, all for two levels of content (the current page and its container)? All while making such options compact, easy to access and understand, and flexible for future features? These are just a small fraction of the ideas mocked up to tackle such a challenge.

Print-on-demand covers

The brief: to design a cover that could be generic enough for any type of content, be flexible enough to allow long titles and long lists of authors, be branded to Connexions, and be visually interesting. Like most of my other work at Connexions, I played with a variety of layouts before a final choice was decided by a larger team with my input.

Rice archive re-do

Rice's Digital Scholarship Archive was using the default DSpace installation with some basic styling. My upgrades not only included a rebranding, but also several structural changes via XSLT to improve the user experience by making the site more intuitive to navigate....

Custom styles for co-branding

These examples show how I altered, entirely with CSS, pages in the Connexions repository so that their styling matched the websites of external groups....

Connexions custom styles

In addition to matching external groups' styles, I also created stylesheets just for user preference or internal use. The biggest challenge they presented was making them flexible enough to work with a great variety of user-entered content. No dimensions of content could be taken for granted.

OERPUB homepage

The WYSIWYG editor project I worked on needed a front page to show off what it was about. There was an existing WordPress site, but it was the default style and lacked the right structure for new visitors and potential collaborators. With installation help from developer Marvin Reimer, in a few days I did a complete rehaul of the style, designed a new logo, installed new plug-ins, and populated the content, giving the site new life.

Center for Technology in Teaching & Learning

CTTL, a Rice University center that designs interactive games for young students, sought to give their website new life and to meet Rice's guidelines for branding of its sub-pages, while also maintaining a distinct look and feel. The redesign, done in collaboration with Francisco Perez, started with a card sorting session, and ended with training the staff to update the content we had populated into the new CMS.

Connexions Consortium

Connexions, my primary employer, needed a simple yet attractive website for its associated consortium members and prospective members, one that could grow as needed without redesign. I designed and built the site in roughly a week, with a simple backend for logging in provided by Ross Reedstrom.

Rice University Press

During the years when Rice University Press made a revival, I was tasked with designing their website. I sought to make an elegant design that was in keeping with Rice's branding while remaining distinctive.

Custom author roles

LibraryThing has a default set of roles you can choose from when cataloging your books (author, illustrator, editor, etc.). But if you happen to frequently use a role that's not on the default list, it's a pain to select "Other..." and type it in each time. This script allows one to change which roles appear by default. Since at the time LibraryThing wasn't using jQuery, I took many of the scripts as an opportunity to beef up my native JavaScript chops.

Amazon Wishlist Exporter

Not all of my scripts are for LibraryThing. This one I made after some frustration with Amazon removing the names of some items from my Wishlists. Now I can just click on the new "Export" button and quickly save a local copy of the list.

Shell/gawk scripting

Nor are all of my scripts user scripts. My first shell script was used to add up how much money I had wasted spent on books over the years, and display a histogram of the distribution. You can see the full script on GitHub.