My name is Chris Vannoy and I design and develop features and web applications as part of my role as the Digital Development Manager of the Innovation & Development department of The Indianapolis Star, a Gannett newspaper located in Indianapolis, Ind. As part of my role, I manage a team of three Rails developers.

I am a 1996 graduate of Roane County High School in Spencer, W.Va., and a 2003 graduate of West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va.

I have been developing and designing for the web on an amateur basis since my senior year in high school and moved into the professional ranks in 2006.

I work daily in JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PHP and have at least a working knowledge of Perl and Django.

I also blog (infrequently) at dummied.org.

Digital Development Manager • Sept. 2007 - Present

The Star/IndyStar.com

Indianapolis, Ind.

Lead Developer/Audience Solutions • June 2007 - Sept. 2007

The Star/IndyStar.com

Indianapolis, Ind.

Web Designer/Developer • Nov. 2006 - June 2007

The Star/IndyStar.com

Indianapolis, Ind.

Online Content Developer • Apr. 2006-Nov. 2006

The Journal News/LoHud.com

White Plains, N.Y.

Sports Page Designer • 2003-2006

The Journal News

White Plains, N.Y.

Assistant Sports Editor • 2002-2003

The Exponent Telegram

Clarksburg, W.Va.

Sports Writer/Designer • 2001-2002

The Exponent Telegram

Clarksburg, W.Va.

Sports Writer/Designer • 2000-2001

The News & Sentinel

Parkersburg, W.Va.

“Want to build a custom (photo gallery) solution? ... Hire Chris Vannoy.”

Indy's Most Wanted • March 2009

Using pdfs supplied by the Marion County Sheriffs Department, I built a scraper that takes the data contained therein to populate a database of the most-wanted fugitives in Marion County. The system directly resulted in the capture of one fugitive within its first two weeks of operation.

FollowIndy • March 2009 — Present

A side project, FollowIndy aggregates all Indianapolis news sources into a browsable, organized view that has the nice side benefit of making it easy to figure out what Indianapolis residents and professional journalists and writing and talking about at any given time.

AutoFocus • Ongoing

AutoFocus is a robust general photo and gallery management system built from the ground up with newsroom workflow, multi-site priorities and flexibility in mind. The system is built to be market-agnostic and easily portable to new installs in other markets in the future (first up: Cincinnati). It features a rugged batch processor that can handle mass quantities of high-res staff photos, and a flexible public-uploading mechanism that allows for quick creation of arbitrary tag-based galleries. More later.

Indy.com • Oct. 2007 — Present

I led the development of Indy.com, Indianapolis' premier web site for exploring and discussing everything entertainment in central Indiana. Along with a team of developers and designers, we built a site that includes: full AutoFocus integration for photo and gallery management and sharing, dynamic (and searchable) event calendars and venue listings, user-contributed reviews, a full social networking suite of friends, messages and posts and a lightweight CMS to manage staff-produced content. The site is still a work in progress, but we feel very comfortable saying that it is simply the best local entertainment site in the country.

Virtual Career Connection • 2007

Virtual Job Expo is a web application intended to provide a platform for short-term job fairs. The feature set includes: private messaging, in-app job application and interview scheduling and resume. The system is designed to handle multiple markets and fairs at once.

LoHudblogs.com • 2006

Before I moved to the online department of The Journal News, the paper's blogs were managed using Blogger (example), resulting in less features, less reliability, less control and a difficult management environment. I spearheaded a move to a self-hosted solution and then built, designed and currently manage a Wordpress MU installation to manage our blogs. Because we deal with a managed environment, I designed custom template code to standardize the features of most blogs while allowing for override behavior on a blog-by-blog basis. Once we move our legacy bloggers over to the new system, the front of LoHudBlogs.com will take advantage of the flexible features that a self-hosted solution provides.

LoHud.com/open • 2006

I designed, managed and was the lead developer on our newspaper's online coverage of the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y. The site uses cutting-edge XHTML markup, CSS and JavaScript. I also coded, designed and helped develop our dynamic photo galleries that operated in conjunction with our Open coverage. I am in the process of expanding the gallery system to handle all photos taken by Journal News staff as well as submitted photos from the public. No longer available on the internet, unfortunately