I'm Ben Keith.

What I've done for others

North Linden Area Commission (2022-present)

The North Linden Area Commission serves as the interface between the City of Columbus and the neighborhood of North Linden. I've been an active participant as a resident, but I officially joined the Area Commission's activities in 2022.

Zoning Committee (2022-)

Volunteered to restart the Zoning Committee in October 2022. As co-chair, developed standard operating procedures and chaired monthly meetings of the Zoning Committee, delivering reports to the North Linden Area Commission. Promoted to chair in June 2023. Launched the Zoning Committee's newsletter in September 2023.

Commissioner (2023-)

Appointed to fill a vacant commissioner seat in June 2023. Ran unopposed for reelection in August 2023. Continued advocacy and policy areas include zoning, alternative transportation, and vulnerable road user safety.

10up (2020-present)

10up is a creative and engineering services agency, serving clients around the globe.

Senior Web Engineer (2021-)

Led ongoing development and maintenance of a project I began as a Web Engineer, took over technical leadership of a government project, a major news website's continuing feature build-outs, and a smaller news site's design refresh. I contributed to the WordPress 6.3 release with documentation, and wrote updated example code for the XWP Stream plugin.

Web Engineer (2020-2021)

Worked with multidisciplinary teams on a number of maintenance projects, as well as helping architect a site redesign for a major newsroom, and led a complex internationalization project.

Institute for Nonprofit News (2014-2020)

The Institute For Nonprofit News hosted a small web development agency that catered to WordPress-using newsrooms. INN Nerds began as a fully-remote, geographically-dispersed team and remained remote through its growth to INN Labs. We focused on theme and plugin development, but those were not my only contributions at INN.

Lead Developer

I took the lead on strategy for our WordPress plugins and the Largo parent theme, setting our priorities during WordPress' transition to the Block Editor. In non-WordPress work, I led the selection process for a static-site builder for Rocky Mountain PBS' Beyond Columbine standalone site, and developed a scraper and some database repair tools.

News Apps Developer (2015-2018)

I worked alongside INN's other developers to develop child themes for WordPress sites based on the Largo parent theme, learned lots, and assisted in plugin development. As part of this process, I helped mentor junior developers in INN Nerds' apprenticeship program, and lead development of several plugins including the shortcode-based Pym Shortcode, which became Pym.js Embeds.

Contract developer (2014-2015)

After returning from my fall 2014 internship at Progressive Dairyman, I accepted INN's offer to continue working with the Labs team on a variety of projects, including several theme redesigns and plugin maintenance and development.

Apprentice News Apps Developer (2014)

Fresh from college, I joined INN's Nerds team as a full-time remote apprentice. In addition to building WordPress sites and learning local development tools, I helped build a web app to create responsive versions of Google spreadsheet embeds (now deprecated) and built a WordPress widget for the Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time API.

Selected work at INN

• WordPress theme development, including styles and custom taxonomies and templates extending Largo, INN's flagship WordPress theme.
  • Current's Local that Works database involved building a scraper to import old content into a new custom post type.
  • Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network involved integration of the WPML translation plugin with the theme and some plugins (not yet released), but it's also a site that we designed and built.
  • San Francisco Public Press and Workday Minnesota stand out as migrations from Drupal to WordPress, with extensive back-and-forth with migration partner GravitySwitch to ensure that all fields were imported correctly. In the case of one failed import discovered after the fact, we worked with Gravity Switch to test and run a fixer script in production. In another case, we had to munge dates to account for timezones.
  • Voice of OC was recognized in 2017 by the LA Press Club as the best news site in Southern California for its design and other factors, and we continued to update it over time to support a non-Gutenberg pagebuilder front page.
  • Eye on Ohio won First Place Magazine Website in the 2019 Press Club of Cleveland All-Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards.
  • We provided maintenance and design updates to a number of sites, including the Center for Public Integrity, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, California Health Report, and NPR's training.npr.org.
  • INN/umbrella-boilerplate was our template repository for creating repositories used by INN for managing hosting and deployment. We switched from a Fabric-based SFTP deploy tool to git pushes as hosting allowed.
• WordPress plugin development, including work on Link Roundups, Pym.js Embeds, the DoubleClick integration Super Cool Ad Manager Plugin, and the Super Cool Ad Inserter Plugin. We also did contract work on The Trust Project's Trust Indicators plugin, NPR's Public Media Platform and NPR Story API plugins, and MinnPost's Object Sync for Salesforce.
• Built and maintained static websites, including:
  • Beyond Columbine for Rocky Mountain PBS using NPR's interactive template
  • Settling for Misconduct for Chicago Reporter using Tarbell
  • Maine Legislature for the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting using NPR's app template
• Continually worked to improve INN's internal and external code documentation, across several GitHub repositories, Helpscout, largo.inn.org, and Read The Docs.
• Helped organize WordCamp for Publishers 2017 and 2019, proposed talks at SRCCON and NICAR, and gave talks at the WordPress Columbus meetup and Ohio State University Open Source Club.
• Trained clients via 1:1 meetings and the weekly Open Office Hours program.
• Contributed links and editing to the weekly Nerd Alert newsletter, and assembled it on a rotating schedule with other staff.

Progressive Publishing (2014)

Progressive Publishing runs a family of magazines for dairy, forage, and beef farmers, with distribution in the United States and Canada.

Intern

From Progressive Publishing's head office in Jerome, Idaho, I helped the Progressive Publishing team develop its Internet strategy while learning reporting skills. In addition to writing for Progressive Publishing's web properties, I:

• Wrote a social media guide, covering Twitter and Facebook for Progressive Publishing's three flagship magazines
• Wrote a guide to using interactives online, and created demonstrations of Google and Knight Lab products
• Assisted in migration of the Progressive Cattleman website to Joomla 3, including hand editing of posts and development of a script to speed up manual cleanup of messy HTML

The Lantern (2012-2014)

The Lantern is the student-run newspaper of The Ohio State University, and operates as part of the School of Communications' journalism program. I first encountered The Lantern through agricultural communications coursework, and contributed reporting and technical skills.

Associate Webmaster

During the 2013-2014 school year, I provided continuing maintenance and support for The Lantern's website and tools. I helped reporters build interactive experiences using Google Maps and the Knight Lab's Storyline.js library.

Web Development Intern at Media Network of Central Ohio

Over the summer of 2013, I worked for The Lantern's parent company.

• Designed and developed an email newsletter template for The Lantern's weekly email blasts
• Designed and built an HTML/JS webapp to assist editors with the email blast template, teaching myself jQuery along the way
• Coordinated and assisted with deployment of The Lantern's new WordPress-based site as part of a migration from College Publisher 6.

Student reporter and copy editor

• Covered breaking news on campus and arts and entertainment in the University District of Columbus, Ohio
• Pioneered use of Knight Lab's Timeline JS for putting ongoing coverage in perspective

The AgriNaturalist (2013)

The AgriNaturalist is the student-run magazine of The Ohio State University College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences.

Editor

• Worked with a small staff to write, edit and design the 2013 edition
• Sold ads to raise money for printing the magazine

Claude Moore Colonial Farm

Claude Moore Colonial Farm was an 18th-Century living-history museum and privately-operated National Park in McLean, Virginia. The Farm's operations were primarily composed of a farm displaying typical tenant farm life in 1771, a thrice-yearly market fair, and behind-the-scenes support operations. In addition to my work as tech intern, I volunteered at the farm supporting daily operations in a behind-the-scenes role for many summers.

Technology intern (2011)

Working behind the scenes of the 18th-Century farmsite, I attended to the Farm's daily operations and technology needs.

• Set up a new WordPress installation for 1771.org, and migrated content from the old static site.
• Troubleshot and repaired computers in office, including recovering data from a dead computer and rebuilding the office network
• Answered phones, took messages, fed animals, lifted bales, toted wares, took out the trash, gave directions