Some of my work

Note: This page is a more than a decade old and is no longer current. Please refer to Rajiv Pant's resume and this list of technology related work.

• PIN/Paperboy - The complete, automatic, customizable system for Publishing newspapers on the web.

  Used by Philadelphia Online to daily automatically publish the www versions of their two newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. Philadelphia Online is the Internet service of Philadelphia Newspapers Incorporated, A Knight-Ridder Company.

  The AI system written in GNU C++ and Perl automates the entire process of fetching, conversion and posting from the Atex networks to the web servers. It preserves fancy text attributes and formatting from the Atex files and creates HTML pages that contain formatted html text with icons (stars, bullets, pens, etc.) It creates index pages for each section of the newspapers. It automatically posts photographs accompanying the stories, editorial cartoons, and columnists photos with the articles.

  It even indexes the newspapers using a complex context-keywords algorithm for later searching as it builds them. Works well together with FreeWAIS as well as Excite for web servers. Tested on Solaris 2.4, IRIX 5.4, AIX, and Linux. Windows NT 4.0 version that will work with IIS2.0/SQL Server 6.5/MS Index Server combination is under contruction.

  Though the system is fully automated, it gives the online editors full control to modify an online newspaper on a daily basis as required. If they want, they can specify which stories will go up where and in which order before the papers are posted.

• Philadelphia Online Clipper Service / Personalized Newspapers

  Extracts information from the entire Philadelphia Online website including the two newspapers, classified ads, comics, horoscopes, daily packages and more that match your profile.

  This information is then placed on a set of web pages created especially for you. Parts (or all) of the informaion can optionally be automatically delivered to you by email.

• Send emails from Atex to Internet and vice versa! Now implemented at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News newspapers.

  Every person who has an atex logon can send a message to anyone on the internet as well as receive emails. No need for newsroom people to learn a new mail program. This is a transparent addition to the existing Atex message system that they are used to. Also no need for network administrators to set up or maintain new mailboxes anywhere.

  Full firewall support as well as customizable security features and logs.

  One bemailg gateway interfaces with as many internal atex networks as you have. A combination of the user's atex logon and atex network name becomes their internet address at your domain. Also, it can automatically generate aliases like Firstname.Lastname@newspaper.com. Tested on Solaris 2.4, IRIX 5.4, AIX and Linux running Sendmail. Will start work on Windows NT 4.0/Exchange Server version soon.

• Mougli Website Indexing & Search System

  Used by Philadelphia Newspapers Incorporated to index and make searchable the entire phillynews.com site.

• Classified Ads on WWW System - A companion to Paperboy. Takes classfied advertisements from a newspaper's ad bank and databases them for searching and browsing via CGI. This CGI program was the first classified ads system on the web to give users a "shopping basket" feature. Users not only search and browse ads in the databases of the two newspapers, they can even collect the ones they want and have them come up on a page that they can save or print. This CGI was the first such classied ads system on the web that made full use of the limited CGI features to give interactivity and usefullness to the online ads database.

• crossword.cgi - The web's first (and only ?) CGI based crossword game. It uses real crosswords from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News which someone occasionally enters into the program. Has an easy to use interface and works with any table supporting browser. There used to be a non-table lynx version too.

  Players can save their positions in the crosswords as bookmarks on their browser. This way, the web server does not have to track who was where. This was the first CGI puzzle/game that employed this bookmarking idea to let users save their positions.

Accessing SQL Databases from Active Server Pages using ActiveX Data Objects

• Restaurant Rover at Philadelphia Online - Look up restaurants, reviews, and menus in the Philadelphia area. Generates SQL queries from the itmes filled in the HTML form.

• Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce Business Directory - An Advanced search form that translates any combination of your selections into complex SQL queries.

• Cyberzone at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. On this site, visitors (real visitors, not online visitors) can make a simple home page. The Franklin Institute expects to have a million people every year make their "Home sweet home page" on the site. This is an example of a SQL server database application which will need to adjust itself as the database grows larger in order to present the results when searches start bringing thousands of results.
  Here are photos of my name on the wall of the Cyberzone exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. credits.jpg, credits2.jpg, credits3.jpg & credits-and-me.jpg.