Since early August, I've been able to tell people that I've been busy "saving the world"--Saving the World at Work, that is. I've teamed up again with the fine people at Rapture Studio (they did the excellent design and we worked together on the spec) to develop this social networking site related to the ideas in Tim Sanders's new book. For a project of this size, and of this compressed time frame, we turned to the CodeIgniter MVC framework to gain additional leverage. Go on over and take a look.
I'm really making good on my threats to start an avant-garde drone metal band
I'm getting ready for the Bureau of Nonstandards gig tonight
I've been finishing up various projects and cultivating some new ones. Before the new ones start, I've been getting into the CodeIgniter MVC framework. It's a pretty natural fit, since I've been using ideas from the MVC world for a year and a half now. Very small footprint, good performance, and quite flexible. And it turns out that some of the things I've been doing in my CMS fill a need in CI, like building out the administrative area based on the structure of the database itself. Interesting framework, and I can see using it for a number of things that are in the pipeline.
I've been working again with the fine team at Rapture Studio on a new site for email etiquette guru Tim Sanders's Email A to Z. While much of it's a standard content site, there are some interesting extensions: you can take Tim's email etiquette test here, and you'll find it enlightening, but the real action is in the administrative section, where I gave Tim access to a number of statistical reports on how people have answered, all of them very intelligently designed by Rapture Studio. The challenge was doing all this as efficiently as possible, and it was a fun project to do because of it.
Long Tail Audio, a group of audio engineers who clean up and digitize audio archives. The site itself is my standard content management system with a very compelling look and feel from design studio Lost In Brooklyn. I did have to spend some time tweaking the presentation to work with the woefully non-compliant IE 6, but the site does render well in all the major browsers. Some interesting additional bells and whistles are in the planning phases, as well.
It's been quite a while in coming--one's own projects come last, after other clients--but I've finally upgraded my own site to the latest version of my CMS. Most of the enhancements are on the admin side or in the structure of the site itself, particularly the database structure (I've become a big believer in convention over configuration, from the MVC world). There are, however, some standard niceties in the front end (permalinks, next/prev) that weren't in the old 2001-era version of the site. (Yes, the dog food was that old.) Updates are easier now, so there'll be even more enhancements this year.
I've done a significant admin upgrade to the Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow Galleries: now the admins can have the galleries build themselves by uploading photos into a staging directory and creating a new gallery without images. The system sees that the gallery has no images of its own, creates the directories with the right names, and populates them with images automatically resized down from raw digital camera images. I'm using AJAX for the image processing to avoid having the scripts time out, and to give users visible feedback while the script processes. While I would have liked to have images uploadable through the browser, the host's form-size limit prevents that, so instead, the scripts process the contents of the staging directory. It's a very painless system to use, actually.
I did all the web development (PHP/mySQL, Javascript/AJAX, and HTML/CSS) on the updated website for Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, one of New York City's leading employment and training organizations. The site includes some animation effects using the Scriptaculous library, a registration system for potential employers to review candidates, search engines for both the site's content and candidate resumes, and Flash-video-based virtual interviews (these are visible only for logged-in employers). The excellent design design work was done by Lost In Brooklyn.
I did all PHP and mySQL as well as some Javascript (including AJAX) on the new site for Infocast, a group that manages energy conferences. Some notable features: an admin area that's easy for staff to use, with convenient buttons for image inclusion and link generation, as well as buttons for common HTML tasks, and an HTML table generator and editor. On the front end, there are some interesting features, like individual conferences having one of two layouts and many different potential color schemes, all quickly selectable in the admin area. There's also a dynamic calendar system and search features for finding conferences easily.
For this site, I worked with the fine people at Rapture Studio, and we worked very hard to get the CSS and Javascript to be compatible with as many browsers as possible.
I did all the PHP, mySQL, and Javascript on a new subscriber system for IraqSlogger, including the interface with the payment processing API. Some notable features include showing limited content to non-subscribers, auto-renewal, reporting scripts, special organization subscriptions with IP-address-based access (some of which are limited to fixed numbers of simultaneous users).
Recently, I ported the site for the NYC ensemble Sequitur from a static HTML model to my CMS. The design was done by Lost In Brooklyn, and it remains unchanged. Underneath the design, though, there are several specialized mySQL searches that populate the page content automatically.
The updated site for Turner | Martin is online! The elegant design of the site and all the photography was by the fine creative team at Tajima Creative Group, as was initial Flash work. My role was making the site dynamic, so that content can be updated by editing text files or uploading new images, rather than having to recompile the whole .swf. It's rather neat under the hood: all the hotspot positions are set by an XML file, as is all the content for the different popups, as well as the background images. This one had a long incubation period, but now you can see the results.