Category Archives: Disney

Dizcollect.com

Posted by admin on April 19, 2010 No comments

Project Specs
Language: Python
Framework: Django
Database: MySQL
Search: Spinx Search
Completely Custom CMS

This site is a personal pet project of mine. I built it for many reasons including learning Python/Django and satisfying my craving for my own Disney web site. As a fan, I saw a need for a site that would help people track their own collections and to easily view what collectibles are available. From a technical POV, this allowed me to really dig into a data centric site with lots of data relationships. Users can create site accounts or use their Facebook logins using Facebook Connect to use the site and track their collections and wish lists.

Our future goals for the site include widgets users can put onto their blogs to share their collections, facebook widgets, more robust wish lists, ebay integration and tracking of collection values. Lastly, we will soon be launching a mechanism for users to start uploading items I currently do not know about or cannot find, hoping to use “crowd sourcing” to help the site and database grow rapidly.

Visit Dizcollect.com »

WDW Radio Online

Posted by admin on February 24, 2010 No comments

Project Specs
Language: PHP
Framework: WordPress
Database: MySQL

I was responsible for all back-end and front-end development.

As a Disney fan, I met Lou through his podcast. I offered to help him with some development and his site at the time was based in Joomla. I made a few suggestions such as creating a video landing page that would consume his youtube channel and keep people on his site instead of pushing them away to view more videos. With these initial conversations a relationship was forged and I built a few Joomla modules for him.

Not at all happy with Joomla, Lou really wanted to move his site to WordPress for its ease of use CMS system, blogging structure and ecosystem of plugins. For the move I wrote several php scripts that exported his content, categories and authors from Joomla and imported them into WordPress keeping his tag, category and author relationships in place. In all we moved about 1200 pages of content. Moving to WordPress also afforded us a chance to re write his skin from scratch creating new CSS, cleaning up images and building a more flexible skin that takes advantage of more real estate on the screen in width expanding the width by almost 100 pixels. With the skin update, we also updated the forums skin to match that of the new WordPress skin to keep a consitent look and feel.

For WordPress I installed and configured various plugins including caching, backup, wp-ecommerce (also tried Shopp for a while), and built several custom plugins. At the server level I built and configured a few timed scripts that also backup the content data and export and backup the raw database to remote locations for redundancy.

Visit WDW Radio Online »

BetaMouse – A Podcast Where Tech Meets Disney

Posted by admin on February 5, 2010 1 comment

n444092770433_6986 Join me and 4 other tech nuts and disney geeks talk about the small little space (ok, it’s actually quite large) where Disney and Technology meet.