Benjamin Reiner

Benjamin Reiner

I’m a web developer in Massachusetts. Since 2019 I’ve been building and maintaining websites, mostly for nonprofits and small organizations where one or two people look after the site on top of their other work. Most of what I do is on the technical side, especially setting up content management systems and connecting sites to other services.

When I’m not working, I’m usually out birding or hiking at a state park or a Mass Audubon sanctuary.

Work

Service alerts for the Block Island Ferry

McGuinness Media & Marketing · 2026 · WordPress, Twilio, Make

When the ferry cancels a trip on short notice, riders need to hear about it before they leave for the dock. I built a system that lets office staff post an alert to the website, social media, and about 4,400 text subscribers from one screen. Moving the texts from a WordPress plugin to a custom Twilio integration cut delivery from about an hour and a half to about twenty minutes.

Read about the ferry alerts

Chickadee

Personal project · 2026 · Python, GitHub Actions, Claude API, Airtable

Small organizations often don’t find out a page is broken or out of date until someone tells them. Chickadee is a command-line tool that checks a website on a schedule and reports what changed, what broke, and what might need attention, with Claude reviewing new or changed pages. I’m running it on this site while I move it to a new setup.

Read about Chickadee

Smaller projects

Tracking down a bandwidth bill

McGuinness Media & Marketing · 2025 · Next.js, Storyblok

A client’s Next.js and Storyblok site had high hosting costs for a long time, and nobody had found out why. I traced it to images that were skipping Next.js’s image optimization. After the fix, bandwidth dropped from about 40 GB a day to about 3 GB, which saved the client roughly $75–150 a month.

A starter template for new sites

McGuinness Media & Marketing · 2026 · Vite, TypeScript, SCSS, Timber/Twig

When we were hiring a junior developer, I realized I’d been setting up most of our projects from scratch. I built a template with the build setup and an MVC-style file structure already in place. It cut setup time on new projects, and developers could move between sites without relearning how each one was organized.

Headless publishing for a healthcare client

Mass Communications Concepts (freelance) · 2023 · Next.js, WordPress

The client wanted a fast, modern site that would be simple to keep up. He’d used WordPress before, so I kept it as the editor and built the public site in Next.js. I also added view tracking so the site could show which articles were read most.

A new site after a rebrand

McGuinness Media & Marketing · 2024 · WordPress

When a small Rhode Island nonprofit changed its name, I rebuilt its site, moving it from Squarespace to WordPress with a custom theme for the new brand. I set it up so their staff could update it themselves, but they rarely had time to, and the agency ended up making most of the updates.

Contact

I’m looking for a full-time web role at an organization working on conservation, animal protection, or sustainability.I’m also open to contract work with small organizations. The best way to reach me is by email at hello@btreiner.com.