Aaron Giles

Web Development

While it’s never been my day job, I’ve been doing web development as a side gig for over 20 years. My experience is almost entirely with the standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack on the server side, and native JavaScript on the client side.

Below I’ve listed all the sites I currently manage, with a bit of detail for the more involved ones.

Complex Sites

The sites in this section all involve extensive scripting (server-side, client-side, or both), or at least have a long and sordid history behind them. They are generally interesting enough to need their own subpages for details.

seattlesings.org — Seattle Sings!, the main site for the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium, first revealed in 2015. This site manages information on ensembles, events, and venues for the 80+ member organizations of the GSCC. Members enter their event and ensemble information using a custom front-end. It then generates an online calendar on the home page, plus offers other features such as a Choir Finder tool to help match prospective singers to choirs in the area.

rehearsaltracks.net — RehearsalTracks.net, a site that offers online choral rehearsal tracks, first created in 2013. The rehearsal tracks were briefly hosted on the Sacred Music Chorale site, below, before moving to their own home, here. Read more about this site’s architecture and history.

aarongiles.com — My personal home page, originally created in 2001. It started off as a completely hand-crafted site, then moved to a model with a custom PHP-driven blog, then went through several shifts and changes which you can read about in detail if you find that kind of thing interesting!

sacredmusicchorale.org — The home for the (now defunct) Sacred Music Chorale, developed from 2009–2015. This site leveraged a set of backend databases for managing membership rosters, mailing lists, member participation, rehearsal schedules, the music library, past performances, and anything else I could think of. Perhaps one day I will modernize and genericize the whole shebang and offer it as a backend service to other choirs.

Simple Sites

These sites are generally simple sites that serve a very specific purpose. They have (almost) no server-side PHP or databases, being either completely static or only occasionally in need of an update, which is done entirely by hand.

seattlevics.org — Vicars of Christ Church Compline Choir, created in 2018. This is the site for my weekly Wednesday Compline choir. It is designed to be zero-maintenance, with the upcoming dates automatically computed, and the link to the latest video automatically pulled from our YouTube channel.

asgengraving.com — ASG Engraving, created in 2018. Hosting page for my various music engraving efforts. I hand-update this whenever I add a new item to my catalog. It features a tiny bit of client-side scripting to dynamically fetch longer descriptions.

summerfling.org — Summer Fling Singers, created in 2016. The home page for my summer choir, the Summer Fling Singers. It pretty much just needs a hand update a couple of times each year to announce upcoming concerts, and then afterwards to reflect the final performance.

zrunek.info — Georgius Zrunek Information Site, created in 2014. This site gathers information on the life and works of one of my favorite composers, Georgius Zrunek. I created it because it was difficult to find any information about him, much less information in English!