Mon Arrondissement
January 5, 2012
PROJECT
Website Development, Graphics
DATE
2007, 2008
DESCRIPTION
Mon Arrondissement (French for My District) is a community-based portal focused on providing district-specific information to both tourists and locals alike.
SERVICES
Graphics, web developement, Google Maps integration
TECHNOLOGIES
PHP, HTML/CSS, XML, JS, Photoshop, Illustrator
SUMMARY
Mon Arrondissement is a community-based portal to provide locale-specific news, events, and information about each of the 20 arrondissements (districts).
Header graphics are completely original. The art direction was to create a visually appealing header for the 18-30 demographic. An urban/grunge Art Nouveau feel, with a touch of “web 2.0”, was the goal.
A notable challenge, aside from the language barrier, was the fact that France’s web culture and Internet infrastructure is not as open as it is in the US. As such, there were few, if any, resources for data feeds.
One such example of a data feed needed is the Paris Metro status notification system. This is a real-time feature on the RATP website, but it is not syndicated. I wrote a PHP script to scrape the RATP page, then to parse and save the data onto a database. That information is then pulled and manipulated to display relevant data on the website upon a page request.