Site Name: Comics2Film
Site URL: http://www.comics2film.com
My longest-running website project has evolved through many forms since 1997. It’s provided a fertile testbed for my web design education and remains a popular destination for fans of movies based on comics.
While I provided the majority of journalistic content for the site durning its heyday, I’ve also been the chief technological architect of most of the site’s features. It now contains tons of PHP and mySQL coding, along with a smattering of perl, javascript and other web technologies.
The content management system was hand-coded from scratch by me, long before turnkey CM software systems like “Post Nuke” rose to the forefront.
Interesting technological facets include the art Gallery, which is an almost completely fan-run entity, utilizing the image upload and organization system that I coded five years ago. It contains editorial controls, but requires only a few hours a week from an editor to keep the steady stream of fan art on display.
Out of necessity to maximize the use of my time as a webmaster, the site has evolved out of the Gallery model. All aspects of the site now allow outside contributors to keep the the content fresh using automated content sumbission, while editors use back-office tools to easilty monitor such submission and approve, edit or reject them.
I also leveraged Amazon.com’s web services to create an affiliate shopping portal that is capable of targeting product suggestions to specific content on the site. The best example of this currently is foudn by browsing movies in the C2F Cinema, and noticing the product suggestions at the foot of each movie page.
While I’d love for the site to return to the full-blown news and editorial magazine that it was in 2003, time and financial pressures dictate that it follow the more streamlined model that it enjoys today.
While I’ll always be proud of the work we did in shepherding the genre of comic-based movies to the forefront of public conciousnes, I’m more proud of the technological infrastructure that controls the behind-the-scenes aspects of it.