Web

Production

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is rapidly becoming my favorite framework for all things web. Time permitting, this site will be replaced by a Rails site. Here's a Rails site I'm quite proud of:

Fine Estate Art

A new reverse ecommerce site devoted to compiling information on vintage Indiana artists, and for attracting sellers of works by these artists. Technical goodies: AJAX search and contact forms, RSS for monitoring new content, XHTML for lean pages and simpler layout code, IE7 for PNGs in WinIE, Flash for a dynamic map of Indiana with highlighted counties.

PHP and MySQL

PHP was, for a long time, my principal language for server-side programming. It's much more powerful than ASP/VBScript, and offers many of the key advantages I had liked so much about ASP/VBScript and Perl. But its thin veneer of object orientation never satisfied me. As it is, it passively encourages too much intertwining of business logic and presentation code.

And MySQL is an extremely quick and easy to manage database engine, with plenty of tools available for rapid database development. It has made SQL a pleasure.

I made these sites with PHP and MySQL.

Cooperstown Bears

The store is built on top of Zen Cart, the best PHP/MySQL shopping cart application, and uses the Zen Cart CSS add on to bring near-XHTML compliance.

Bobbette's Country Treasures

The store is built on top of Zen Cart, the best PHP/MySQL shopping cart application, and uses the Zen Cart CSS add on to bring near-XHTML compliance. The banner links section is administered and served with PHP/MySQL.

I made this site with PHP:

Lively Ox Records

So far this site is strictly PHP. But it will soon become a Rails site.

ASP/VBScript

I was initially attracted to the way ASP/VBScript can be embedded in HTML. Until then, Perl was used as a separate CGI script to process information on the webserver. ASP/VBScript allows one to accomplish layout and processing in one file, fine-tuning each to the other. The other nice thing about it is that it can use data from one page while processing another (i.e. "maintain session state") — something that was a bit more difficult to accomplish in Perl. I helped make these sites with ASP/VBScript:

Easter Seals (now superseded by a much less attractive design)
designer: C.W. for PiperStudiosInc.

Contact forms, email modules, and rotating image sets are processed in ASP/VBScript.

Rigby Education (The Rigby site has been superseded by the new Rigby Steck-Vaughn Harcourt site.)

Contact forms and email modules are processed in ASP/VBScript.

Perl

Perl remains a very useful language for many purposes. It is the first language I learned upon returning to programming after many years. Unfortunately, there are many problems with Perl code(rs) and Perl's performance too numerous to dissect here. It's still indispensable, however, for many tasks. Below are examples of projects on which I used Perl.

where2getit.com

Helped rehabilitate elaborate store mapping backend, and assisted in fleshing out the admin system. Paul Baker and Kurt Stephens were the Perl gurus who did the heavy lifting. It was a pleasure to work with them.

Rigby Education (The Rigby site has been superseded by the new Rigby Steck-Vaughn Harcourt site.)

Many modifications to the UBB bulletin board system were made in Perl.

Sawtooth Technologies
designer: Ethan Miller for PiperStudiosInc.

Many modifications to the UBB bulletin board system were made in Perl. The demands of this project caused me to search later for alternatives to Perl and UBB!

WebDNA

WebDNA is a strange and rare web application development language. While it makes some tasks difficult, it makes others exceedingly easy. I'm still not completely convinced the trade off is worth it. But it's too late. I've learned it. And there's work to do. Below is an example of WebDNA sites I designed and/or built:

Meru Tea
designer: C.W.

I took what I learned building the Cooperstown Bears site and streamlined the API, making the URLs shorter, more mnemonic and more Google-friendly. This was a long project. But seeing Christina's excellent design (and copy writing!) come to fruition made it all worth it.

Cooperstown Bears (since migrated to Zen Cart and PHP/MySQL)
designer: Me (with several elements retained from Donn Ha's earlier design for Hey! Company).

Designed and built this entire site, integrating a third party shopping cart application.

At the invitation of my friend Chris Brandt, I began producing web sites at the now defunct PiperStudiosInc, working with some of the best designers in the business: Donn Ha, C.W. (a curse upon whoever has forced her to anonymize herself), Brad Love and Ethan Miller. Their beautiful and clever designs presented me with new challenges on a daily basis. I've rarely enjoyed working with another team as much. We fought together through the various versions of NetObjects Fusion, wrestled with the early incarnations of DreamWeaver and GoLive!, and even flirted with ASP/VBScript, IIS/SiteServer and ColdFusion.

Email addresses

Why are the email addresses down here? And why aren't they "spelled" properly?

Well, because I'd be handing over my friends' email addresses to every automated email harvester on the planet. They'd wonder why they were getting so much spam. And if they ever found out it was because of me ... well, I'm sure you can guess the rest.

Just replace the "_at_" with "@" and you're on your way.