Scranton, Pennsylvania
I build things because I want them to exist.
Lately that's maps, calendars and old street corners of Pennsylvania. The day job is fifteen years of building websites for other people, mostly colleges and universities.
Things I made this year
All free · All 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 Gazette
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 →
Then & now, same frame
Historical Scranton
Street scenes of Scranton matched against the same view on Google Street View and cut to the same frame, so you can slide between them and watch a hundred years disappear from a corner you drive past every day.
VINTAGE POSTCARDS · SLIDE TO COMPARE →Why bother
The answers were already out there. Nobody had put them in one place.
All three 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? What did this corner look like a hundred years ago? Every one of those was sitting in an agency spreadsheet, a venue calendar nobody reads, or a postcard in a drawer somewhere. Collecting them took a few months each, and nobody is paying me for any of them.
Day to day I do a different kind of work, building websites for colleges and universities. If yours has gotten away from you, I'd be glad to hear about it.
If you need a hand
CMS work
Components, templates, migrations, audits. Mostly Cascade, mostly higher ed — fifteen 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 →