10 years online. That’s freakin’ old for a website.

But the site has shed it’s “Darth Joker” skin and has a snazzy new look and feel for the 20th century.

…er…crap. It’s already the 21st Century, ain’t it?

But, hey! The site looks great and we’re giving away free stuff every day!

Stop by and read about comic book movies, and take some stuff off our hands already!

I just upgraded. The install process is still not for the faint-hearted (back up a bunch of stuff, delete a bunch of stuff, get ready to redo your customizations), but I personally had no difficulties with it.

I was calling on obsolete thing in my custom skins, but it was fixed with changes to two files.

Other than that, I can’t wait to see what’s new. I understand performance improvements are in the offing and there are a bajillion new anti-spam tools.

CHEESE IT, SPAMMERS!

Back in 2005 I wrote two Juvenile Fiction novels for Komikwerks, which were to be published under their Actionopolis banner. The publishers, Shannon Denton and Patrick Coyle, were struggling to keep their webcomics portal going while launching this new book company and realized they needed technical help in both endeavors. They brought me in December on as a partner in order to leverage my web skills.

By the end of February we had Actionopolis.com online, ready to promote the book launch. The site needed to be attractive and agile…displaying the books, enabling easy updates and inviting the authors and illustrators from the line to participate in adding content to the site.

Patrick Coyle worked up the initial visual design for the site with input from Shannon and myself.

I handled the technical aspected of breaking the visuals down to CSS/XHTML and installing the content management backend. Over the six months leading up to the actual launch of the books, I’ve continued to extend the content managment system and alter the look of the site.

In late June we decided that coding for 800×600 was resulting in a cramped, cluttered front page that probably only accomdated a small fraction of the audience. I revamped the design to widen it for a 1024 pixel screen and reduced a lot of the textual clutter. This meant that four of the seven launch books were now completely visible above the fold.

Skills Employed

1. Installed the surprisingly flexible b2evolution as our primary Content Management (CM) system.
2. Employed intensive PHP scripting to push the CMS beyond its primary blogging purpose and into a book-centric system.

My buddy Shannon Denton wanted a website that he could easily update to promote himself and his fine works as a comic creator/publisher/animator/dude. So naturally he got his partners in crime to work up a site for him.

Patrick Coyle worked up the visual design for the site based on Shannon’s mandate that it make him look “as cool as a NASCAR driver”.

I handled the technical aspected of breaking the visuals down to CSS/XHTML and installing the content management backend.

And lo…ShannonDenton.com was born.

Skills Employed

1. Installed b2evolution as our primary Content Management (CM) system.
2. Employed some clever PHP scripting to allow Shannon to update various aspects of the site completely through the blogging interface.
3. Attempted an integration of Plogger gallery, which remains incomplete at the time of this writing while we wait for Shannon to upload his artwork.

This past weekend saw the launch of a website I’ve been working on for several months. QSoftGuide.com is the website for a long-running and well-respected resource in the arena of quality and process improvement. More than just a catalog of software, books and other publications, the Guide aims to help decision makers in the realm of business and manufacturing learn about the tools, techniques and experts that can help them implement QA strategies.

QSoft Guide was purchased last year by IDEACore, who I’ve been working for since last summer. The previous guide site suffered from a dated design and was locked into a proprietary, hosted commerce system that made maintaining the catalog problematic. IDEACore aimed to bring the guide into the 21st Century and free it from the constraints it suffered under.

This project required extensive work from me in developing the technological backbone of the site. My goal was to convert it from a clunky site that was difficult to manage to a flexible site that was easy to update on an ongoing basis.

Most of the work required PHP/MySQL coding. Work in the cart also involved making use of the Smarty template engine for PHP, including template editing as well as a few custom-coded Smarty plugins.

Skills Employed

1. Installed and evaluated various eCommerce solutions.

2. Finally installed X-Cart as the new eCommerce solution (cart).
3. Wrote custom scripts to move data exported from the proprietary cart (in an Excel spreadsheet) to the X-Cart tables.
4. Installed and evaluated various content management systems.
5. Finally installed b2evolution as our primary Content Management (CM) system.
6. Coded various scripts which are utilized on the site’s index page to bring content from the cart and CM into focus on the front page.
7. Implemented a managed database solution for allowing a repository of downloadable software demo files along with a demographic and contact info collection system used when demo downloads are requested.
8. Wrote a unified search script that could accept search words and return results from the cart, CM and demo repository. The search words can be one or more words or quoted phrases. The search is capable of AND/OR logic, although this was disabled in the interest of keeping the search form compact.
9. Coded various bridging scripts to link items in the cart to articles in the CM. This allows QSoft editors to easily expand product pages to display links to related: articles, reviews, consultant entries, demo downloads and more.
10. Coded special reports to give the QSoft editors better reporting about the contents of the cart.

As with past IDEACore projects, the graphical and aesthetic design, including the new compass logo for the site, was created by Brianna Roberts.

Here’s some webwork I did recently, utilizing JavaScript.

I was contracted by White Rabbit Graphic Design, who was in the midst of revamping the website of artist and jewelry-maker Rick Ruggles.

For his new jewelry line, Rick wanted a form for shoppers that would allow them to see a preview of the product they were shopping, which would change as they changed their order parameters. There’s a morse code design, which Rick inscribes with a secret message specified by the shopper, and also the XOX line.

There were about 20 variations on each product line that had to be previewed for the shoppers.

The morse code line was particularly challenging, because not only would the image change as the user made selections, but the form itself would change in certain cases.

The job went fairly quickly…I think about 10 days between initial contact and the site going live. It’s probably the most extensive JavaScript programming I’ve done on any given page. It also involved interfacing with third-party shopping cart software.

Rick and LJ at White Rabbit seemed pretty happy with the final result. Rick reported selling a ring in the first 24 hours of the site going live, so I guess the form is effective.

In 2004 I was contracted by IDEACore to participate in the revamp the website for Mayor’s Time, a social services organization in Detroit. While IDEACore had grephic designers working on the look and feel for the primary site, they needed someone with strong Web/DB skills to revamp the Program Locator component of the site.

The Program Locator is designed to help connect parents in Detroit with after-school programs for thier kids to participate in. They had an existing system, which was coded in JavaScript Pages and mySQL.

It had many deficiencies, including a clunky interface for the parents, poor tools for managing the database. This resulted in a poorly managed dataset, which left the databse containing lots of outdated information that often times gave the parents less-than-useful results.

The folks at Mayor’s Time were mandating a PHP scripted system…good news for me, being that’s my area of expertise.

I first redesigned the database to allow for more flexible data management, normalize the database and enforce referential integrity.

The parental tools were revamped dramatically to allow for a more pleasant and easy-to-use searching system. The parents could now conduct a search with one click of the mouse, and continuously refine the search by changing the parameters.

The presentation of the results was also enhanced dramatically, and we were able to provide parents with much more informative pages with a few new excitement features.

The coolest stuff I coded was really the back-office tools. The new tools enforced referential integrity and all the basic database stuff, doing away with the hundreds of widowed and orphan records from the old system. I also added timestamps to all records, allowing the data manager to review program data that my be old or out of date.

The new system encourges program providers to participate in the management of their own data, greatly reducing the amount of incorrect or stale data that might be held in the system. It also reduces the time burden on the Mayor’s Time staff.

Of course, the data manager at Mayor’s Time has complete control over what goes onto the site, but is allowed to act as more of an editor while the program providers create the actual content.

Specifically I coded a PHP/MySQL engine for the After School Program Locator system run by the Mayor’s Time organization in Detroit. The whole thing is designed to connect parents and their kids with the numerous providers of after school activities.

Other members of the IDEACore team can take credit for the look of the site (and the parent site). My task was working out the database design and coding the technical infrastructure.

I have to say I think the site came out rather well.

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.