Posts Tagged XML
BU Annual Report 2010
Each year, BU publishes an annual report to update the community on the status of the university in various categories such as research, campus life, and financials. The publication features an accompanying website designed to coincide with the look and feel of the print pub. See my discussion on the 2009 Annual Report for reference. This year I created a new Flash introductory experience and all of the JavaScript functionality on top of a layout design by Scott Dasse.
A Farewell Update to a-g.com
I am leaving Allen & Gerritsen as of Friday the 9th and starting a job as a Flash/Web Developer at Boston University on Oct. 13. As the latter of my two weeks notice period elapses, I’m catching up on things that have been on the back burner as well as finishing off projects and documenting projects upon which I’ve been the sole developer. One of those back burner projects was enhancements for http://www.a-g.com which, as a result of a potential new site concept being nixed, could no longer be put off “till the new site went live.” See below for the additions.
Since the company has embraced social media rather rapidly, they really wanted to get the company Twitter feed incorporated on the site. This small addition pulls in the user timeline XML file, breaks it up into two-tweet-pages, and links each tweet back to its home on Twitter. The more tweets text takes you to the full a&g Twitter page.
Search integration. In the drive to bring everything you’d expect from a plain HTML/dynamic site to Flash, we needed to incorporate search. Uses WordPress feed based searching to return XML results that meet our custom tagging criteria (some posts do not appear on the Flash site and only appear on the HTML version that lies behind it at http://blogs.a-g.com). Click an item here, and the UI loads the blog as if you’d launched it from the menu, but it also reveals the URL you could give out to someone in the event you wanted to direct link them to that post.
And here’s the new look. Search box in the lower right. Farewell a&g!
I still have a post to write about Endway, a WordPress customization project, and possibly a quick link about MySpace page customization, but it appears MySpace changed some of their layout/CSS and it broke the page I customized a little bit.
More photos of the comment system in action, as it is starting to create the conversations we originally hoped would develop:
Keane
Looking to enhance the appearance of the Keane website, we put together a new look for Keane. Designed by Charlie Guerrero and co-developed with Max Guerrero. My primary contribution to this site was layout implementation and assistance with further customization after the .NET structure was established. I also implemented the dynamic features on the homepage. As always, we targeted IE6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3/4.
Reuseable XML Driven Flash Microsite (clubhouse.a-g.com, p2p.a-g.com, www.newmodelarmyusa.com)
Originally as a means to highlight specific segments of work for targetted consumption, I worked with Charlie Guerrero to put together a template of sorts, driven entirely by XML, to allow for customization of content and reuse of the project. So far, the “site” has been used three times: http://clubhouse.a-g.com, http://p2p.a-g.com, and most recently http://www.newmodelarmyusa.com. The images below are in that order.
Also please note, images in this post are PNGs and are much larger than previous posts, please be a bit patient with the image loader if you choose to view them larger as this blog is just on shared hosting.
The 99 Restaurant
The 99 Restaurant chain, a long-term client of a&g, had an aging website. I was the developer on a project designed by Barbara Malec to give the 99 website a significant facelift, help make things more dynamic and easier to update, as well as more modern.
Berklee College of Music Summer Programs
Following our success with Berklee Valencia, we took on another project for Berklee. They wanted to enhance their look online to attract new people to their summer program so we were set to differentiate the Summer Programs site from the rest of the Berklee look and give it a very hip, young feel.
bodyco
Bodyco is a new gym in Massachusetts featuring state of the art equipment, a soothing atmosphere, and lots of group and one-on-one training from highly qualified professionals. The agency put together nearly everything for the client, from logos to posters, the website, email blasts, business cards, letterhead, even the color palette for the physical location. I was in charge of the web presence and was the sole developer from the design by Carlos Perez.
Berklee Valencia
Berklee College of Music and SGAE partnered to create a new university in Spain called Berklee Valencia. We were hired to create the web presence of this new school and it was our first piece of interactive work from Berklee after the agency was appointed agency of record. The site exists in both English and Spanish, with a toggle that allows users to switch between languages for any given page, just about everything site-wide is translated.
Allen & Gerritsen Website
When Allen & Gerritsen began its rebranding process to a&g, a new website was developed as part of that rework. This project came after that, to bring the agency’s presence into the present, utilizing external APIs, social network integration, and company-wide blogging. We developed a full-browser Flash website, utilizing over 40 custom classes, Tweener, TweenFilterLite, the Newcommerce.ca Youtube library, and the Adobe Flickr library as well as custom integration to WordPress to act as our blogging engine.
United States District Court of Massachusetts – Website
We were challenged with the task of modernizing the USDC website, migrating all existing content, and integrating materials that previously did not exist on the site. I worked in tandem with another developer on this site, sharing the majority of all tasks. We were required to create the site without utilizing server-side technologies due to limitations on the mandatory hosting environment as well as the need for updates to occur without us. The site is currently maintained by employees at the court using Adobe Contribute CS3. Read on for a more in depth breakdown and the live link.
