Shawn Rider

Creative Developer

I make things for people using computers. I try to work on good stuff that helps the world. I like to share, and I play nice with others. Want to chat? Get in touch.

Web sites and endeavors

I have been building websites since 1996. I work all sides of the stack, from content and design, to usability and accessibility, to complex frontend Javascript applications and (usually) Python-based backends. Sometimes I give talks about building things for the Web. You can see those on my Slideshare account.

PBS Learning Media

I worked on the architecture and buildout of this major PBS Education initiative as a partnership between PBS and WGBH. The purpose of the site is to bring the best educational assets public media has to offer into the classroom with no charge to teachers.

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My Wiser Health

This service provides healthcare information about conditions, treatments, tests and insurance coverage. It correlates survey, research and statistical data to deliver the most relevant information for patients facing long-term, expensive issues.

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PBS TeacherLine

PBS TeacherLine provides online professional development for teachers of grades Kindergarten through High School. Courses are delivered via custom ecommerce, student information, and course management applications.

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Writing fiction and nonfiction

I make digital texts that are generative, randomized, or playful in various ways. The works below are examples of that.

PitP

An experiment in user-participation and contribution to the story in the form of textual vandalism. This piece uses reCAPTCHA and a mySQL database to tell the story of researchers following a strange social media phenomenon.

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soRandom

A dynamically assembled short story based on keyword assocation and multiple narrative points of view. Pages are put together from a database of pieces each time you read, requiring mulitple read-throughs to experience the bulk of the content.

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mannish: birth to grave in a masculine way

A low-fi, low-bandwidth commentary on the state of masculinity in America.

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The Pink Lady and the Academic Marxist

Another low-fi, low-bandwidth e-poetry experiment.

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His Fat, His Dumb, His Weak, His Lazy

Early literary criticism that aims to contextualize and introduce George Saunders.

Tarradiddle

A connected set of stories set in a small Southern town.

Digital Arts Manifesto

A manifesto for digital arts written at the request of Tony Conrad.

On Juvenile Techno Delinquency

A nonfiction memoir about being geek in the 1990s.

The Silenced Majority: Colonization of the Mind and the Flesh Eating Zombie

A critical examination of zombie films from a postcolonial point of view.

Video experiments and shorts

Connect profiles and communities

I'm generally game to try whatever new thing I come across, so you'll find me on far more networks than those listed below. You can use these links to get in touch with me in a multitude of ways.

Professional
Technical

This page was made by shawnr with bootstrap and jquery and bower and node.js some other things.
Paintings by Bea. Photos by me.