Northern Virginia is a big area, encompassing many jurisdictions. There’s also about a million people living here. With so many residents and cities, knowing what’s going on in the area is tough. Multiple independent news outlets provide great coverage, but the operative word is independent. Arlington new sites aren’t going to cover stuff in Fairfax City.

I wanted a way to get a bird’s eye view on Northern Virginia, so I created NoVA Scanner as a quick peek into the goings-on of the various localities. In creating this website, I took it upon myself to learn a new WordPress framework: Bedrock. This handy framework provides a great starter theme as well as a professional deployment mechanism (Capistrano at the time I developed the site). The learning experience was great, exposing me to various PHP tools, including Blade and Composer, and it got me comfortable managing and deploying sites at development, staging and production levels.

The end result is a fast-loading site that gets a fair number of visits. News is pulled from multiple RSS sources and aggregated into an easy-read format.