Projects
Hanford Vit Plant needed an updated look, the ability to edit their content easily, and social media integration for their aging website. Working with the people at Hanford, a communications and media company, and a local graphics designer, we designed a new style and refreshed the content. I created a social media wall featured on the site to import content from Facebook, Flikr, and YouTube. This allows them to feature specific social media posts and content on their site. Since the old site ran on Expression Engine, I had to convert all the previous content and bring it into Drupal. The new look is fully responsive and solves many issues Hanford had with their previous content management system.
North Wind underwent a brand and logo change and this meant that the website needed a redesign. I had just converted the site from WebsiteBaker to Drupal the year before so all it needed was some clean up and a new theme. I worked with a local design company to create the new theme and assisted them as they have not made a Drupal theme before.
The Pocatello 2013 July 4th Parade had a "People's Choice" Award for floats in the parade. The customer wanted the ability to allow people to vote for their favorite floats by sending the float ID (or multiple IDs) via TXT message. They also asked for the results to be displayed on a website when the voting was over. We decided to go a bit further and add responses to the TXT votes and display the results live, as they came in, on the website.
We needed a way to parse, store, and respond to TXT messages to make this interactive. We decided to use a TXT service that allowed a connection via a Jabber client. Then we found a Jabber PHP library so we could listen to the incoming TXT messages. Next was some message parsing code and a MySQL database to store the votes. After the messages were parsed and stored, we sent back a TXT message confirming their vote using the Jabber to TXT service.
There were a couple issues we had to work around. The TXT service we used throttled outgoing messages and did not queue additional messages sent once that limit is reached. There was also no way to test if the limit had been reached and no response from the service either. After some trial and error, we discovered the limit and built in a message queuing system to handle the outgoing TXT messages.
The customer also so needed the ability to start and stop the voting period. So we checked incoming TXT messages from certain cell numbers for special commands that started and stopped the voting results. This way they could control the voting period while they were at the parade.
The website was a fully responsive, AJAX reloading, live results page that updated as votes come in. It was built using Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery.
North Wind's web servers were slow. I researched, developed and tested a new LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that runs on top of Ubuntu 12.04 Server Edition. The improved response from the new set up allowed North Wind to consolidate 3 external web servers down to one external server, and greatly improved the responsiveness of many internal web applications. This process included utilizing Apache's MPM Worker mode, PHP CGI/FCGI with FPM, APC - PHP optcode caching, Memcache, and MySQL tuning to squeeze out as much performance as possible. I currently maintain and tweak all North Wind's Linux web servers.
Deployed a corporate chat service. Employees can join group chat rooms, conduct audio and video conferencing, and use desktop sharing. Employees are authenticated against LDAP.
- Screen shots are from the Jitsi website
Assisted and developed the design for a non-profit animal shelter organization.
I maintain the Linux server and hosting environment for the Hanford Vit Plant construction project as well as some content management. The site uses the Expression Engine CMS for content management.
Converted and designed the North Wind Group public facing website. The old website was designed in WebsiteBaker and I converted it over to Drupal. One of the new features of the site is that news posts are automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter. The new design made sure that Public Relations could post content without having to go through IT.
North Wind was contracted to develop an iOS application describing the details of the Idaho National Laboratory. This app presents a virtual tour to prospective researchers, politicians, and others. This is a very visible part of INL's marketing strategy. I assisted in the development of the iPad app and ported the app to Android and small screen devices. I also continue to maintain the web version on North Wind servers.
Seeing the ridiculous price of high-end car stereo entertainment and navigation, I decided to build my own. I used a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7" tablet, a small Amp (to power the car speakers), equalizer (stabilize and boost levels and to route low-end frequencies to the sub-woofer Amp), USB power converters, various wires and other components and custom plastic fabrication (cutting plastic with an old soldering iron). Later on I added a steering wheel control to keyboard adapter that worked very well with Android. All this provides a superior car infotainment system for less than 1/2 the cost of a comparable device you could buy at the local audio shop.
After a couple years using this setup, aftermarket Android based stereos finally reached a point where they could be used instead of my custom solution. I ended up purchasing an Android based car stereo that was better (in most ways) than what I had built. The model I bought was a Newsmy NU3001.
We developed a Aegir and Drupal template system that will rapidly deploy a collaboration system. These sites include several key collaboration features namely, Project Files (Project & Public), Project Contact Directory, Announcements (Project & Public), Events (Project & Public), Project Links, and Project Photo Gallery. We are now able to stand up a project site with little effort and cost. I was involved in the design, development, and maintenance of this project.
Note: Most of the content in these sites are private, and therefore are not visible to the public.
Created a system to manage the project information along its complete life cycle. Manages workflow, notification, approvals, business intelligence reports, and centralizes important documents for proposals and projects. It is being widely used by North Wind's proposal and project management. I was involved in the design, prototyping, development and maintenance of this project.
I assisted in the design and currently maintain the Environmental Management Citizen Advisory Board (INL EM CAB) website. This site is for presenting the CAB's minutes and objectives.
Open Atrium, a Drupal installation profile, was implemented to replace the functionality of SharePoint's small group collaboration sites. Using Open Atrium allowed us to create groups and have collaboration features like announcements, calendars, and documentation. We developed several custom features including tasks, files, forms, links, and lessons learned. There are many groups within the company that use this extensively for their group management. I was involved in the development and maintenance of this project.
Small group collaboration sites was one part of North Wind's old SharePoint system.
With 8 team members, I lead my senior class project incorporating the systems development life cycle. We went through the phases from project and requirements definition, planning, systems analysis and design, all through development and testing, and a final presentation to our client.
I was the project co-leader in charge of code and design.
WoWRoster is an automated, extensible, and multilingual character and guild profiler which displays and stores data gathered from World of Warcraft through the use of AddOns (CharacterProfiler, GuildProfiler, and PvPLog).
WoWRoster organizes all of the data collected via these AddOns, provides a suite of presentations for the gathered data, and houses a base for WoWRoster Addons to access and manipulate roster data, displays links in a Menu, and presents output to users.
I was the project administrator from 2004 to 2010, I currently administer the forums which run on phpbb3.