PhillyFinder was first unveiled at a meeting between PNI's Management and the Online Department in 1997. Rajiv presented them with a working version as a proof of concept for a unique web portal application. (I prefer working models to PowerPoint presentations.) Soon afterwards, PhillyFinder was presented to the public as a beta site for preview. Users who used PhillyFinder loved it because it got them precise search returns. The Directory and Search technologies designed for PhillyFinder have since then been used in several other applications at philly.com.
On the Technology side, Karl Martino, Web Applications Programmer, did a great job in making version 2.0 happen. Working with Rajiv, he created a new and improved editor interface for managing the portal, greatly improved the user interface making search results from various data sources work seamlessly together, and re-worked the database backend. Rajiv Pant, Manager of Technology & Implementation, developed the pre-1.0 and 1.0 versions in 1997.
On the Editorial side, Bob Jonason, Online Editor, and Frank Donahue from the News Research Department helped design the 1.0 application with their knowledge of Site Design and Library Science. Ches Wajda, Design Director, worked on the user interface and graphic design for the 1.0 version. Jamie Sims and Saleema Syed who were then interns with Philly Online helped manage the information in the database. Chris Kilbourne, Managing Editor, helped design the 2.0 feature set and user interface. Others in the Philly Online staff as well as the people who used the service and sent us their suggestions were also intrumental in the development of the product. Chris and Saleema along with other staff members now maintain the database.
(Note: The job titles mentioned above state the positions held be the person when they worked on that part of the project. They are all likely to have new titles by the time you read this.)
Both PhillyFinder version 1.0 and version 2.0 are currently powered by Microsoft Technologies: NT 4.0 Server running IIS 4.0, Site Server 3.0 and SQL Server 7.0. The various pre 1.0 development versions of the software used FreeWais, Excite for Web Servers, in-house developed web spidering software developed by Rajiv, an in-house developed search engine by Rajiv, and a file-system/flat-files based database all on Unix. By using the above Microsoft technologies, we were able to focus on the integration, portal engine and editor interface and other things specific to PhillyFinder to make it a highly useful, usable and unique product. We did not have to develop and maintain the pre-1.0 code for the web spider, indexing engine, and file-system/flat-files based database system. With the limited time and resources that were allocated to PhillyFinder, we greatly benefited from having the MS Site Server 3.0/SQL Server 7.0 platform to build our application.