Starting on Jan 3, 2012 I will be joining SALT Branding, a rock star branding agency, as their Director of Technology. My responsibilities will include running their IT, being a technology consultant to their clients and most importantly being their developer and managing 3rd party developers when we have overflow. To all my Disney friends, these guys helped brand and do the logo design on Expedition Everest and Virtual Magic Kingdom.

I’ve been a developer and technologist for a long time and this is the next logical step in my career. I am very much looking forward to the challenges ahead.

Aside from the new job, I am also going to make good on something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. I will begin writing more on this blog about technology, code I write and use and will share more of what I do on a day to day basis, hoping it will help others in their work. I also hope to begin writing more on my second passion and that is Disney. I’m still fleshing out those details and will hopefully try and use that to fill the gap left behind by the closing of Betamouse.

Lastly, I want to thank everyone I’ve done work for this last year including TouringPlans and especially Henry Work and Len Testa for allowing me into their world. I had the opportunity to work with good people and good developers learning a lot about my craft.

Here is to new beginnings and a great big beautiful tomorrow.

-stb

I was responsible for all front-end and back-end development including HTML/CSS/JS and installation of Drupal including creation of custom theme and integration of theme into the Drupal CMS. Includes Google Map API and Google Geocode integration.

Visit A Home Within »

I was responsible for all front-end development including HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Visit What’s My Power »

I was responsible for all database design, back-end and front-end code and all flash on the site.

Developing for Francis Ford Coppola is like watching one of his movies. It starts off a bit slow and sets the field of characters. Then it moves into the second act and feelings and story begin to emerge and in the third act the story crescendos and then ends with all the lose ends tied up and you walk away feeling satisfied.

Front Page – The Flash Timeline

The front page was the most challenging aspect of the site and the piece most dear to Francis. His goal was to represent a time-line of the winery and his story with wine. He also didn’t want a simple and plain time line, he wanted something that had the feeling of an old school catalog, maybe an old Sears Robuck catalog or Whole Earth. Lastly he wanted some interaction and animations to bring it all to life.

I built a small modular framework for the timeline where each ‘module’ derives from a base class and each have a set of shared functionality. I also created modules that can be reused such as those that display single images, slide shows and flipping images. Along side those we also have custom modules built with specific pieces of code and functionality like the “swimmers wanted” module and the logo/news rotation module. With the framework and module structure I designed, modules can be created, reused and placed into the timeline with ease.

Back End and Content Management

To support the site, I built a robust Content Management System that meets the unique needs of this site and the company allowing content owners to edit their content without interaction of programmers and designers. 95% of the site content can be edited from within the CMS.

For our asset management, I created a web application called “Media Manager” which interfaces with Amazon S3 for external assets used on the site including most all images, videos and flash. Amazon S3 was chosen because of bandwidth issues and lack there of where the site is currently hosted (internal). To interface with S3, the ThreeSharp library was used.

The Wine Chooser

The Wine Chooser takes advantage of ajax calls to create an interactive question tree a user can go up and down based on answers to questions until they come to the final page where we recommend a wine for their needs.

Custom Blog and Search Engine

With the site being written in .NET, we decided to write a simple blog engine to run inside of the site for our News posts. The blog engine supports drafts and published items, tags, categories and is search-able using the Sphinx Search Engine which I implemented using a C# library wrapper.

The Rest of the Site

The rest of the site takes advantage of lightboxes, carousels, and some custom ajax calls to add some unique functionality and content views of the site.

Visit Francis Ford Coppola Winery »

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 »

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.net Blog

BetaMouse on Facebook

BetaMouse on Twitter

BetaMouse on iTunes

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

The site was built using the Drupal Framework and Content Management System. This allowed the content owners the ease they wanted in updating the site but also being able to have a system that was well known and they could attach developers too down the road with minimal costs.

Visit BCCI Construction »

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

The site was built using the Drupal Framework and Content Management System. This allowed the content owners the ease they wanted in updating the site but also being able to have a system that was well known and they could attach developers too down the road with minimal costs.

The Dental Office pages integrate XML consumption services from the Bright Now! systems to pull in real time office information and location allowing customers to easily and quickly get data on local offices they needed for appointment making.

Visit Bright Now! Dental »

I was responsible for all database design, back-end and some of front-end code and flash on the site.

Francis has many resort locales, but his big three are in South America. This site was created to help promote these locations and give people the experience and feelings they would have if they were standing on the beach in Turtle Inn, Blancaneaux or La Lancha.

Back End and Content Management

To support the site, I built a robust Content Management System that meets the unique needs of this site and the company allowing content owners to edit their content without interaction of programmers and designers. 95% of the site content can be edited from within the CMS.

For our asset management, I created a web application called “Media Manager” which interfaces with Amazon S3 for external assets used on the site including most all images, videos and flash. Amazon S3 was chosen because of bandwidth issues and lack there of where the site is currently hosted (internal). To interface with S3, the ThreeSharp library was used.

Visit Francis Ford Coppola Resorts »