hobolog :: Web Development

Sometimes quickie projects are the most fun. Vernal had me write the recipe changer for Square Deal Farm’s new website in exchange for maple syrup. Can’t wait to try it!

The crisp design of this wildlife sanctuary and retreat center site is by Free Range Studios. My contribution was to implement some jQuery interactivity, like the expanding footer menu, and a fairly complicated navigation system. No Google maps this time around, but I did work a bit on the fun little sanctuary map. Now I want to visit this place!

How many times has someone used this site to encourage President Obama to make progress during the climate talks in Copenhagen? I wrote a WordPress plugin that will instantly create as many atomic counters as needed, and some client side AJAX to keep track of all the different types of actions one can take. Try one out, and maybe we’ll see how the site handles six figures, or seven…

This video sharing application was built with the CodeIgniter PHP framework and makes heavy use of the Facebook API. Both of these were new to me when I came on board to fix some problems with the existing application. My impression of CodeIgniter is good, I may use it again for web applications that don’t need a whole content management system. The Facebook API does not leave such a good impression. Despite a maze of online documentation, I had to learn the important things through experimentation. I’ve learned a lot about sharing content, especially with Facebook, but the customized videos are still magic to me!

Time for another maintenance release of Geo Mashup:

• Change Log
• Upgrading

This art project based on the concept of traffic islands as public space uses maps as one of many perspectives on the subject. Fairly standard Geo Mashup customizations are used in creative ways to produce engaging interactions. For a project with a limited budget, you may find it difficult to stop browsing, even if you’re nowhere near Los Angeles.

Today is the second anniversary of the project, which looks like it has a long life ahead of it.

I’ve made a maintenance release of Geo Mashup that should resolve a few minor issues. Happy upgrading.

• Issue 228 – Inline location (geo_mashup_save_location) not working
• Issue 219 – locate_template() undefined in WordPress 2.6
• Adjusted sub-cat titles in the tabbed index control to show only when they have located children

This is a simple presentation of events on a map, with a fun spotlight effect for highlighting a particular event. Geo Mashup needed some significant work to associate a date with a post location – a feature that will now be included in the next release.

The No Impact Project promotes a new book and movie about a family that went to extremes for a year to reduce their environmental impact. I like the movie clip under “see it” – my guess is that most of us will identify with Mom’s experience.

I’ve written a small web application for viewing Flickr photos in a specified order: Ordr.

The main motivation is to provide a way to view Group pool photos in order by date taken. On my recent hike in Wyoming there were many good photographers taking pictures, all of them Flickr users. A Flickr group is a great way to collect all those pictures in one place, but you can’t view them in the order they were taken, so there’s no story. Ordr makes a group based on an event much more useful.

Flickr can and should implement these features, but until they do, this is a workaround.

I’m sharing this application, but having written it in my free time, it’s only lightly tested. If you use it and find a problem, please let me know.

The free libraries phpFlickr, jQuery, and Galleriffic are used and greatly appreciated.

This site houses a database of academic centers, businesses, foundations and non-profit organizations engaged in global development. Each member can list all the countries they are active in around the world. The former site had no map interface to this extensive data. The focus on country data lead me to choose the Google Visualization API Geomap rather than my Geo Mashup plugin for the interface. The result is a near perfect way to present their members’ global influence and query the directory.

In addition to the maps, I implemented the member submission and editing forms. I considered using a plugin like TDO Mini Forms, but in the end I needed more fine control than the plugins offered, and wrote the forms as WordPress templates. This allowed me to do things like generate checkbox collections from the category tree.