I would love sing the praises of my latest project, but it seems that I do not have to; Mark Shieh, of the @rivermrkt, took care of all the singing for me. I’ll touch on the technical aspects after I let the choir resound in a letter written to the New Westminster Leader.

P.S. (Post Script) grew from conversations between Briana* and I about interactive ways to contribute to New Westminster.

We wanted to nurture more poetic cities. It’s about seeing extraordinary beauty in our everyday lives. In this way, we are all poets. Briana and I thought tweet-sized poems might be a fun way to share our stories and experiences as friends and neighbours.

We engaged Melissa LaRivière** to create the web design and Wes Koopmans*** to develop the code and database programming. psnewest.ca has some sweet innovative features: a horizontal scroll that mimics the act of writing from left to right, a starring system that enables people to vote for their favourite P.S. poems, and every poem is also simultaneously tweeted on twitter.com/psnewwest

P.S. is social media, both online and offline. It’s about sparking conversations between friends and neighbours in more playful ways. We will refresh the poetry contest every season. For this first P.S. Contest, we are inviting people to contribute a poem about summer in 80 characters or less. The grand-prize winning poem will be featured on River Market in a grand way. The poet with the most-starred poem will receive a special edition River Market iPad.

P.S. is part of River Market’s grander Arts program. River Market Arts includes a community artist in residence program as well as public art works being commissioned for site-specific installations in and around the Market.

www.psnewwest.ca
www.twitter.com/psnewwest

P.S.
*Tenth to the Fraser: www.tenthtothefraser.ca
**Melissa’s Website: www.melissalariviere.com
***Wes is also a New Westminster resident. Our city has amazing technology and new media talent!

The front-end theme was coded based on a design by Melissa LaRivière. I believe this was Melissa’s first go at designing a website, but she was great to work with; if you are looking for some creativity, check out her website at www.melissalariviere.com.

As far as my work was concerned, the site is hosted on WordPress 3.0. I suppose I could have used custom post types, but WP was still in RC when I started development. I went with PodsCMS to hold the data. I coded a Entry Moderation Panel Plugin with PodsUI in about 2 hours (PodsCMS is great for rapid development). The whole site was developed part-time over a 3 week period. Twitter tools takes care of bringing the poems to life on Twitter; poems are automatically tweeted when they are approved on the admin tool.

There’s not much else to say, there is no blog and only 3 pages. All of the other River Market duties are handled at www.rivermarket.ca.

Thank you Mark; thank you Melissa; I’m looking forward to more projects in the future.

P.S. I Love #NewWest.