Scranton, Pennsylvania
I make complicated websites behave.
Thirteen years of it, mostly for colleges and universities. In my own time I build maps and calendars of Pennsylvania.
Two things I made this year
Both free · Both about Pennsylvania
A layered map of Pennsylvania
Keystone Atlas
Every historical marker in the state that anyone knows the location of — 2,585 of them — laid over seventy layers of parks, trails, rivers, coal fields, glacial borders, mine workings and towns that aren't there anymore. It started because I wanted to know what the marker down the road actually said.
2,585 MARKERS · 70 LAYERS · KEYSTONEATLAS.ORG →
NEPA events, two weeks out
The Northeast Almanac
Markets, gallery openings, hikes, dive bars, opera-house touring acts — everything happening around here for the next two weeks, set like a weekend newspaper. It reads the venues' own calendars every morning at six. There is a genuine amount going on in Scranton and nobody was listing it.
FREE · NO ADS · NO ACCOUNT →Why bother
I make things I want to exist. Sometimes other people want them too.
Both of these started because I got curious and couldn't stop. What does the marker down the road actually say? Is anything happening this weekend that I'd want to go to? The answers were out there — scattered across agency spreadsheets and venue calendars nobody reads. Collecting them took a few months each, and nobody is paying me for either one.
The day job is the same instinct pointed at somebody else's website. If yours has gotten away from you, I'm not hard to reach.
If you need a hand
CMS work
Components, templates, migrations, audits. Mostly Cascade, mostly higher ed — thirteen years of it now.
Small websites
Fast, plain, and simple on purpose, so you can keep it going yourself once I'm gone.
Whatever broke
Something stopped working and nobody knows why. I'm pretty good at finding out.
Small and specific is my favorite kind of job.
hello@mattwren.dev →