New Book Released

Kentico just released their first book with Packtpub. I just got my first tech bio published in the very same book!

Check it out on Amazon (look inside to read my bio)...you can tell the fame has gone to my head...

I am well and truly chuffed/grateful that they asked me to be a reviewer. This is certainly something I wouldn't mind doing again...he hinted.

Congrats to the Kentico team and to Thom Robbins for the great work.

Back to school...

Over the past year I have worked a smorgasbord of Kentico sites. All this experience was put to the test recently and I can now brag to loved ones about my new certifications namely:

- Kentico certified developer trainer
- Kentico certified developer
- Kentico certified end user trainer

I have trained several companies now in Toronto. Its been great fun getting developers up to speed with Kentico and promoting what it can do.

Having worked with some of the other big players in the market (Ektron etc) I can really see the ROI in using Kentico for the sort of sites my current employer builds i.e. fantastic.

When developing with Kentico all my time is spent building new custom functionality rather than fixing things that should have worked in the first place.

12 months and no updates - WTF!

Here's the deal. I have been ridiculously busy both in and out of work. Plenty of nine-to-five. Plenty of freelance. Below are some of the sites that have kept me busy. I was tech lead, developer or just plain old technology consultant on the following:

- DesignStor [site + mobile]
- Canada's History
- Honens
- The Memory Project
- Munk Debates
- T-Shirt Monster
- CESO

Designstor/CESO-SACO work done freelance for Built By GIANTS. All other sites done for my employer - ecentricarts.

FYI, having blown enough hot air about a site redesign here @ MAMR, I am finally working on it. Now what to build it in... open source, .Net, something new?

Flash + H264 video

ChilliBean (London, UK) approached me in May 2008 looking for a Flash application that would work with their media asset management API.

You can test drive it here on my site using a demo account.

This application is fully object oriented Actionscript using the Model/View/Controller design pattern. I also had to do a fair bit of recoding to the JW Player to get it to meet their requirements.

Had there been more time then I may have developed the player from scratch. Perhaps on another project I will...

This was a freelance contract done on my own time.

Copyright MEANDMYROBOT.

ASP.Net CMS

Our solutions are mainly ASP.Net. That said I still do a considerable amount of object oriented PHP development. This site for St Joseph's Lifecare Centre is one example of several ASP.Net systems that I put together and extended for them.



As is the nature of the beast, I also provided training in the CMS.

Well you could say I might be biased, but I still prefer the CMS that I built from scratch... more on that in the next wee box.

Copyright Inorbital Inc.

How to build a CMS

I designed and built the Canadian Sports Hall Of Fame (CSHOF) Content Managment System from scratch, leading a small agile team for development.



The bespoke system was built because they already had several very large existing MySQL databases. They also had a lot of requirements outside of the usual article management.

The CMS was built on a linux box using object oriented PHP using the MVC design pattern, PEAR, YUI for AJAX and TinyMCE for the rich text editor.

On the first day that the CMS went live the client added several events, sponsorships, news articles, flash galleries etc. All without a hitch. We got some really good feedback from the client and our focus on requirements traceability really paid off.



Copyright Inorbital Inc.

Building T-Shirt Monster

T-Shirt Monster is a site where users can design and purchase T-Shirts. Their work is displayed to the public and in their own totally customisable gallery. Somebody bought your shirt? You get a cut of the profit!

I built the site, designed and developed all the Flash web applications and created the bespoke software that takes the saved design and creates the images printed on the shirt. I designed the integration of these apps with our e-commerce tool with Nick Efimov and Mark Coatsworth.

The main languages/frameworks I am using on this project are: Actionscript 2, MDM, GD Library, ASP + .Net, JSON, XML, AJAX, Mootools and some Prototype.

I did a lot of graphic design on the site. The Lead Designer, responsible for branding, core page templates and the mischievious monster was the wonderful Mark Balson.

Check out the main Flash app here.

Copyright Inorbital Inc.

Conference Teasers

In 2007 Shoppers Drug Mart wanted a series of interactive online Teasers for their annual conference. The end result was a book theme that incorporated a different game in each Teaser.

The project was so successful that they came back for more in 2008.

2008 - Travel Magazine Theme

I was solely responsible for this project and it was a lot of fun. From story boarding with the client, scripting photo shoots, graphic design, illustration and good old fashioned Actionscript 2.0 game programming, these Teasers had a bit of everything.

All the teasers were built in English and French.

2007 - Ted 'VP of Fun'


Copyright Inorbital Inc.

Department Spotlight



The success of the Teasers led to a monthly contract. This time the focus would be on the various departments at Shoppers Drug Mart.

I chose the theme of a message board because it would enable the content to change with the monthly theme, but also give me an interface that I could keep and reuse. The preloader was changed each month as well to reflect the theme.

Full screen Flash was used and the content was designed in such as way as to appear correct in all resolutions from 800 x 600 and up.

Once again I was responsible for all production from illustration, graphic design and development.

Click on the image below to see a screenshot of the Christmas preloader.



Copyright Inorbital Inc.

JavaScript Versus Flash

Working with a Lead Designer like Mark Balson is always very rewarding. Right from the beginning of this project he wanted the homepage to have some wow feature.

For the age old reason of search engines, Flash could not be used. What we ended up with was an interested accordion feature on the homepage developed in JavaScript.

I did use Flash in two sections that WOLFEWorks wanted to showcase their methodology and past clients. JavaScript would not have provided the best solution for these sections.

JavaScript Accordion

Flash Interactions

CMS DIY



Simply Pictures was a freelance job that I designed and built at the end of 2007. The two big requirements were content management and no Flash on the site. Not a huge deal but the client still wanted fancy movement.

I used Mootools for animation to get around not having Flash. It is exciting what can now be done with common javaScript libaries.

The CMS was designed and built from scratch. I had always wanted to build my own and this contract gave me that opportunity.

Mootools provided some nice UI features for the CMS including draggable sorting of images and data.