Web Consulting Washington DC

We have been working recently with the folks at Project On Government Oversight (POGO) on their new and improved Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. This database site is a resource that tracks the top 50 federal contractors and their, errhm, bad habits.

Their goal was to provide a centralized database listing of instances of misconduct, and vital to that was making sure the system easily provided all their cited publicly available sources.

POGO was founded in 1981 and they are an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government.

We provided consulting and development services for their new database site. They needed something they could easily update and keep track of large body of links and information on a daily basis.

The database itself is a customized CMS system, completely CSS driven with built RSS feeds to facilitate syndication and tracking. In other words, pretty nice tool. Future articles we will discuss some of the underlining technologies, why they should matter to your business or organization and how you can benefit from these relatively news technologies.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

PHP is one of the web’s most popular programming languages and it’s one I am most comfortable with in general. It was created at a time when the available conventional programming languages like C or Java were too powerful (low level) or too bulky and unwieldy. Somewhere in between the jack-of-all trades Perl and the so-simple-our-sales-guy can code it Cold Fusion, PHP was incarnated.

It was the first web developer programming language written by developers for developers and it continues to be a force of nature, even in the face hundreds of new languages that have since been created.

Well, PHP4 (version) has recently been officially declared dead, to focus energies on the vastly improved PHP5 and make room for the soon to arrive state-of-the-art PHP6. Thanks to killer innovations like WordPress (consequently, what we use for WCDC), PHP is here to stay and the latest innovations can only continue to solidify as the leading scripting language for the web.