Project: Text Cleaner Tool
While at the Tacoma News Tribune, I designed and implemented an internal web-based tool that allowed colleagues from across the department to quickly format and stylize text from emails, websites, or spreadsheets for use in the newspaper.
The idea was inspired by a limited feature in a third-party tool used by a few coworkers, which only supported specific data feeds and offered minimal formatting options. After reverse-engineering how it worked, I proposed an in-house PHP/Perl version. And with help from a coworker on server configuration, we successfully deployed it on our intranet.
Our version introduced several improvements: leveraging Perl’s full regular expression capabilities to restructure and remove sections, using standard programming logic to truncate and organize lists, and styling the output using Adobe InDesign markup—reducing these formatting and editing tasks from minutes down to seconds.
Over time, I maintained and expanded the tool, writing new scripts and updating existing scripts as data sources changed. I also proactively supported colleagues, often proposing scripts tailored to their specific workflows.
The tool earned positive feedback for its ease of use, time savings, and my responsiveness to support requests.