Summary of Web Development Experience

I have been developing internet websites for myself and my employers since 1996. The half-life of websites is pretty brief in these volatile times, so much of my work no longer exists online.

-Dwight Newton, Oriscus.com

Oriscus.com

Oriscus.com is my personal web playground. I have been developing resources here since2001, but have had other personal sites since 1996. There are various sections on my site that contain either serious business information or fun personal stuff.

• Musical Instrument Resources is an extensive annotated database of MI related sites. This is by far the biggest traffic area of my domain, currently generating over 1000 visitors a day, despite not having been significantly updated in a few years.
• My résumé. Hire me.
• Technology Resources for Nonprofit Arts provides help in tech planning and development. I developed this interest when working with the Arts Commission in Arizona. I am a certified arts technology consultant with the Kentucky Peer Advisory Network (KPAN), a program of the Kentucky Arts Council.
• Essays Archive contains short pieces I've written about various subjects that pique my interest. See also the 2006-2007 archive of article I wrote for Nougat Magazine (Lexington, KY).
• Other Interests/Proclivities is my personal home page with links to other activities I'm involved with, including art, family, travel and music.

You can also see the development of my user interface over the last several years.

Mewzik.com

The musical instrument information pages on Oriscus.com have proven so popular that I have moved those activities to their own domain. The Access databases are being moved to a MySQL/PHP platform. At this writing, the resources exist partly on both sites as they transition to Mewzik.com.

University of Kentucky School of Music

I have been the full-time marketing coordinator and webmaster for the UK School of Music since November 2003. In the summer of 2004, I did a major overhaul of the site, with contains several hundred pages. For this site, I developed a number of MySQL/PHP database-driven pages, especially for the events calendars and faculty lists.

American Musical Instrument Society

AMIS.ORG is the website for this academic society of which I am a member. I did not design the site, but I restructured the site architecture and upgraded the content for standards compliance. I am also the editor of the AMIS Newsletter and I moderate the AMIS-L Listserv, hosted by the University of Kentucky.

Mozart Society of America

I began developing this site in early 2008. It promises to be a substantial resource for Mozart scholars. Of special value will be an archive of early Mozart biographies.

KY-Festivals.org

KY Festivals was a project that provided online planning tools and other resources for rural festival presenters in the Appalachian region. The intent of the program is to improve the cultural heritage and arts aspects of traditional community festivals.

Kentucky Festivals is a partnership of Arts Kentucky, Kentucky Craft Marketing Program, Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Folklife Program, Appalachian Heritage Highways, and Kentucky Department of Travel/Cultural Heritage Tourism. The project is made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Appalachian Regional Commission, and is managed by Arts Kentucky. I was the web developer for the project under a contract which lasted two years, ending in early 2005. As far as I know the site has not since been updated.

The Center for Old Music in the New World (CenterForOldMusic.org)

The Center for Old Music in the New World has been performing and presenting early music (i.e., pre-1750) concerts in Central Kentucky for over 25 years. I have been fortunate to be a performing member of this great group for for about 15 of those years (off and on). I also serve on its board of directors. We are just beginning a process of developing a substantial web presence for the organization that  includes an early music events calendar, in-depth information about our organization, and a database network of local players, teachers and learners.

Kentucky Historical Marker Database

I was given a grant by the Kentucky Historical Society to convert their published index of roadside historical markers into a searchable online database. This involved pulling the data from the original Pagemaker formatted text file and normalizing it in an Access database with appropriate HTML tags for text formatting. There were nearly 2000 historical marker records in the database. This serves as the basis for ASP search forms to pull up the various records. I created a beta site on my server that generated around 100 to 300 visits a day without even trying. KHS has since integrated the database, including my clickable state map of Kentucky counties, into their own website.

Andrea Een (AndreaEen.com)

Andrea has been a professor of violin and viola at St. Olaf College in Minnesota since 1977. She is also a foremost authority on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. She has been in production on several new CD projects including her outstanding Hardanger fiddle recording, From the Valley.

Arizona Commission on the Arts

Arizona Commission on the Arts (ACA) is the state government arts agency, where I was on staff from July 1998 to September 2001. I was contracted to maintain and develop the website for another six months after that. I created the original site from scratch in 1998. It underwent two major revisions before the end of my contract in February 2002. There is only a little evidence of my work left, but I do take credit for moving the Commission onto the web, which resulted directly in massive savings in printing and postage for their several annual publications.

Large projects I was responsible for included:

• Arizona Arts Rosters (2000 & 2002)
• Traveling Exhibitions Rosters (published every two years, 2000 & 2002)
• Strategic Plan (executive summary published 2000)

ACA screenshot - 2000

ACA Strategic Plan
screenshot - 2000

ACA screenshot - 2001

ACA Fellowship recipients
screenshot - 2002

Arizona ArtShare

ARTability

Baldwin County Library Cooperative

Thomas G. McFaul

Tom McFaul, musician, composer and jingle writer (the now infamous Meow Mix commercial among many others). This site was created by my brother Lynn Newton, as his first foray into professional web development. He consulted with me frequently during this process. Created in September 2002.