Levi Brinkkoeter - Programmer

This is the latest website we have released, The TrueFACS, a medical bill auditing service. It is very interesting what hospitals are charging people, working on this site has taught me to review my bills very carefully. Some hospitals are charging outrageous amounts for something that costs dollars if not cents. You can view the site to see some examples one that really stuck with me was the hospital charging you for medicine you brought in, and not the price you got it for, it was the most expensive Tylenol Ive ever seen. Working on this site made me take a step back and try and keep things simple. “You’re too deep in the medium to see the outside” or something along those lines was said about some of the functionality we had planned. I can usually see both sides but it gave me a reality check, and its correct, you become so involved in doing things a certain way that sometimes it just complicates things beyond what they should be. The web is a very vast medium, you have both sides i.e. simple functionality vs advanced functionality. Tying the lead form on a website into a database while also including necessary parameters not to mention data validation, is a major focus of the other websites ive worked on. This one wasn’t the leads aren’t going to have the same volume as i am used to so it doesnt need the same treatment. Just simple and to the point, get the user interested and start a dialog with us so we may help them save money. With this release we become a step closer to wrapping up our current batch of projects hopefully freeing me up to get back on the ASP.NET track. There are still quite a few to nail down but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

After about 3 weeks of development the new www.iCanbenefit.com is live. We took our time designing and tweaking it trying to get it just perfect. There are still some minor tweaks to work on but getting the site live out weighed some mis aligned text. All of our products are back, wearing their HCCUA disclaimer where needed. There are bigger plans still for the site, a member backend where they are able to use their benefits. There is automation behind the scenes, dump a users file into our database creating a password and sending out the new members fulfillment materials via email. That is not quite being put to use yet but it is built and will be pulling its weight soon. I laid the site structure out differently this time and I am liking the results. There is still more work to be done but it is mainly in flash and laying out some of the heavier content areas. Now that I have a little down time I will trying to pick up what basic ASP.NET concepts that I can. I will basically be starting from scratch and go through the growing pains from basic functionality to the more advanced stuff. For now I am content with just taking it slow not overwhelming myself in code. I am still learning some more advanced coldfusion features and will use it for my own personal projects until I feel confident in ASP to achieve the same effect.

I have temporarily stopped learning and playing with asp .net for a little while now, the needs of the business needed to get a site out quickly and coldfusion being my stronger language at the time we decided to crank it out. Brand new design, layout and functionality are all coming together in a relatively short time with all that is going on. I do love the speed at which I can develop in coldfusion, asp gives me the impression that is it more secure and a better way to do things yet at the same time it takes more work, more planning, more code. That’s not to say its a bad thing, It may be a better way to make websites more secure, better functionality, and ease of tying it with systems that are being developed for our company. The main reason to upgrade was to have a back office system that we could send our members their fulfillment material electronically, at least temporarily until their real fulfillment could be sent out. We are going to be giving the user temporary id cards to print out. Our artist, Ian Hench, created the cards and saved them as pdfs and I provided the functionality to pre-fill the form with the members information. The new design lets us put out benefit plan information back in provided a few disclaimers are in place. The system is set up using loops and stored procedures to display what plans are available in what states. It can get overwhelming sometimes but it does help not having to hard code everything into the page and design a system to display it. Early next week icanbenefit.com will be getting a face lift, look forward to our new design and some new flash pieces to come later on.

Just figured I would post an update as to how things are going in my process of learning asp .net. First I am starting with C#, with my prior experience from C++ it is moving along at a good pace. A few things are different but I can see why. I have just been brushing up on the basics until now, I am starting to get into interfaces and some other unexplored areas. Soon I will begin work on the first project to be done in asp. It will take longer than normal because I have a learning curve at this point but it is not such a huge project that it will be overwhelming. The iCan Benefit site is getting redesigned and we are taking this chance to migrate it to asp at the same time. As it stands it is a relatively flat page and I am going to use the model-view-presenter design pattern to lay it out. It is still a process and I may be too busy learning to get around to blogging in awhile.

I have been working more and more with the integration of Coldfusion and Adobes PDF format. Since they are both Adobe products they work well together. One can make a form using LiveCycle Designer and pre-fill fields for the user. There are many advantages to doing this: one use was the card reprint function for The HealthCare Credit Union Assosication . My first idea was to use images and just to write text to the images, but the image was not vector and ended up coming out all blurry at the size we needed them. So I took the Photoshop file they were made from and made it into a pdf with a form I could put the users information into. The image scaled nicely and made it readable for our members. You can also use the forms for submission, like a regular HTML form. It makes automation a little easier because you can control where the file is saved and what file name so that the human element doesn’t have a chance to mess it up.

Today I applied some of the upgrades that have been in the works for HCCUA. The first step was the improved login system, users now set a password to use, security questions in case the user forgets their login. In the process I learned more about MS SQL and standard SQL pratices, mainly stored procedures and some functionality. In the process I also learned about cfwindow, a nice little coldfusion tag that makes a pseduo popup window. I believe its more of a <div> than an actual popup which is nice so that popup blockers wont block it. With the new process in place the next stop is to redesign the layout of the benefit dbs. Going to learning about relational databases and how to make them easier for data entry and overall layout along with functionality needed for the site.