Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine

Location

Visit this page at http://www.smartphonemag.com/

As the online presence of an industry publication, this site required a lot of custom features. 

The home page itself is a custom script which retrieves the most recent content on the site and looks for an ideal balance of blog entries ("Experts Online"), articles from the current issue, articles from back issues, and help & how-tos.  If it doesn't find enough articles of a certain type in the most recent articles, it promotes an old article of that type, making it appear new again for the purposes of displaying it on the home page.  Since all these tasks are time-intensive, the page is cached on the server and only refreshed every 10 minutes.

Smartphone Magazine Blogs

Visit this page at http://www.smartphonemag.com/cms/werner.ruotsalainen

All the bloggers at Smartphone Magazine are volunteers, so they have to be treated well!  Each one gets a personalized page with a bio at the top.  The menu at left shows all the bloggers in order of prolificness, so the more they contribute, the higher billing they get.  Each blog entry has keywords that allow readers to view related articles.

Smartphone Magazine Forums

The default appearance of the forums provided by Drupal wasn't up to the expectations of Smartphone Magazine's design team, so they came up with a custom look and told me to implement it.  As you can see, it has a sort of a Star Trek: the Next Generation feel!  VIPs and Moderators are acknowledged with special flags by their names, and users may add photos and bios of themselves.

Smartphone Magazine Table of Contents

Visit this page at http://www.smartphonemag.com/cms/current-issue

Generating a table of contents for the online magazine was tricky business, because we wanted to encourage people to subscribe to the print magazine.  Accordingly, a few articles are given away for free to whet the appetite, but current subscribers can log in to read all the articles online.  This was accomplished through a custom script.  As you can see, some of the titles in the table of contents below are live links, while others are not.

Smartphone Magazine Article Ad

Since advertising is the bread and butter of a magazine, we had to find ways to gain as much ad revenue from the Web site as possible.  One way we did this was to divide the magazine articles up into several pages, and insert an ad directly into the middle of the text of the page, as shown below.

Prairie Star District UUA

Location

Visit this page at http://www.psduua.org/Congregations/List

PSDUUA had an online listing of contact information for congregations that was separate from their offline database of such information.  We made an online copy of the database and wrote two add-on programs, DataQuery and DataPlates, for the PmWiki software that powers the site, to allow the database to be viewed and even updated through the wiki software.  A separate custom program was necessary to synchronize the two databases.

Prairie Star District congregation display

When an individual congregation is viewed by a staff member of that congregation, an extra "Edit the Above Information" button appears that is not visible to the general public.  Farther down the page is a listing of the congregation's staff and volunteer officers (visible only to district and congregational staff), each with its own edit button (visible only to the congregation's own staff).  All this information is stored in an online database and synchronized with a database in PSDUUA's office.

Prairie Star District congregation edit

When a staff member of a congregation clicks the Edit button, he or she is presented with a form where each piece of information can be individually updated.  Any changes are made in the online database immediately.  When the PSDUUA administrator runs a synchronizing program, she can compare the online and offline copies of each piece of information and decide which changes to approve and which to revert back to their previous values.

Prairie Star District carpools

Visit this page at http://www.psduua.org/drupal/carpools

PSDUUA represents an eight-state area, so transportation to conferences can be a big issue for many volunteers.  We used Drupal and the Google Maps API to create a simple and intuitive way for attendees to coordinate carpools.

iPhone Life Magazine

Location

visit this page at http://www.iphonelife.com

Unlike Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, iPhone Life is just one of many dynamic Web sites about the iPhone.  Accordingly, we decided to give a lot of home-page real estate to RSS news feeds from other sites: the Current News headlines and Latest Apps reviews in the left column below are summaries of content gathered automatically from other sites, while the Expert Blogs in the central column are unique to this site.

iPhone Life subscription page

Online subscriptions to iPhone Life magazine required a shopping cart program -- Ubercart -- and some special coding to bypass the step of putting an item in your cart, so that when you click the Subscribe link on the public Web page, you go straight to your shopping cart (shown here) and can then immediately check out.

Blue Boat Home

Location

visit this site at http://www.blueboathome.com

This is a personal site for a young couple who recently bought a house together.  They wanted a way to keep both their families and friends up to date with pictures and news of their new life.  The site features an interactive photo map and blogs, with RSS feeds and email subscriptions available.

Permaculture Research Institute - Cold Climate plant database

Location

At the Permaculture Research Institute - Cold Climate, volunteers can add and edit records in an extensive database of plants. All changes are saved to a special holding area until they are reviewed and approved by a staff member. This database front-end was designed entirely using two modules I wrote for the open-source PmWiki project: SelectQuery and UpdateForm.

Fox Tales International

Location

One of the main ways I can guarantee standards-compliance is by building valid XHTML on demand from simplified wiki markup. I have taught more than fifty people of all ages (16-65) and all levels of experience to create and edit pages on a wiki. Brian "Fox" Ellis, a professional storyteller based in Peoria, was editing his own pages -- using a handsome template of his own design -- in less than half an hour! His site now includes pictures, music, and a PayPal shopping cart, all done with simple, easy-to-learn wiki markup.

Secure Products Wiki

Location

visit this site at http://www.secureproductswiki.com

Occasionally a client comes to us with a real technical challenge... in this case, the plan was to make a wiki site about military-grade encryption products whose technical specifications are classified.  The public face of the site allows anyone to see the products that are available, but not to see any details about them.  After logging into the secure part of the site, a visitor to the same page can see the classified technical specifications and provide reviews.  Since we at Interdependent Web do not have security clearance, we had to set up the secure site without seeing any of its content -- all content was contributed after we completed the job.

Prairie Folklore Theatre

Location

visit this site at http://www.prairiefolkloretheatre.com

When Fox Ellis approached me about doing a second site for him, he wanted it to look like it was printed on a worn and burnt piece of parchment.  This was a challenge, but we were both satisfied with the results!  The home page features two custom Flash slideshows which also have torn edges.

Fran Stallings, Storyteller

Location

Visit this site at http://www.franstallings.com

Fran Stallings is a professional storyteller and musician, performing hundreds of times each year all over the US and other countries.  She wanted a Web presence that would not require her to learn a lot of complex software.  Her previous site was written in Netscape Composer, which despite being WYSIWYG was difficult for her to use.  I converted her site to a wiki and taught her the simple editing rules.  She now updates the site several times a month and has added entire new sections to its organizational structure without guidance.

Environmental Storytelling

Visit this page at http://www.franstallings.com/EnvironmentalStorytelling/Resources

Fran Stallings's wiki site includes a section called Environmental Storytelling that features a different look from her own site -- she wanted a separate site for group projects without the need for a separate domain name.  The Environmental Storytelling pages are simply regular wiki pages within her wiki, but because they are in a particular page group they are given a distinct look which clearly communicates that they are group property, not her own property.

Abundance Ecovillage

Location

Visit this site at http://www.abundance-ecovillage.com

Abundance Ecovillage, a loosly incorporated, ecologically sustainable housing project near Fairfield, Iowa, needed an attractive Web site that would be easy to update.  I set up a wiki for them and trained one of their members to use it in an hour.  Despite being a full-time farmer and mother, she is able to update pages as needed in just a few minutes per month.

Angela Davis, Yarnspinner

Location

visit this site at http://www.yarnspin.com/home.php

Angela Davis, a New Orleans-based professional storyteller who draws heavily upon Cajun culture in her tales, felt strongly that she wanted a Mardi Gras theme for her Web site, complete with gators, crawfish, and strings of beads.  I obliged as best I could!