Mr. Bob's Weblog

Below are some projects I worked on. Of course, there are others.

Election Reporting Widgets/”Blocks”

Some time ago, there was a question brought up by a stakeholder at a news site about reporting live election results. During some time between day-to-day support ticket, I came up with a solution.

The CMS we use (Blox CMS) is built using “blocks” (similar to “organisms” in Atomic Design). For this, I built a PHP-based retriever/parser of election results that needed to work in a very limited hosting environment, and the “blocks” needed to allow site editors to report election results. Below are some examples of how they’re being used:

• Free-Lance Star (Fredericksburg)
• Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond)
• News Advance (Lynchburg)
• Daily Progress (Charlottesville)

They’ve been in production use since 2016, but I continually work when time allows to improve them, using feedback provided from site editors before and after each election cycle. Then, the code for these widgets/”blocks” are shared across sites, and version controlled in a internal GitLab instance.