Foliopod
http://foliopod.com
This website was designed by my business partner and I over a few weeks in our "spare" time as the face of our upcoming business. It is coded in XHTML/CSS using Mootools to speed up Javascript development time, and PHP for all of the contact/share forms. Validation is handled by passing the information that needs validating to custom-written PHP scripts with Javascript.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver), fileZilla, Navicat MySQL
Tuscany Construction Plan Room
http://michaelkowens.com/dev/planroom
To view the site in its two different forms, you must login with the demo credentials supplied below.
Administrator Login: demoadmin
Administrator Password: demo4321tc
Contractor Login: democontractor
Contractor Password: tc4demo
This website was developed in 3 weeks of off and on development as my final direct contract with Digital Source Media. The contract called for a two-user login structure (with no intention of ever growing that number), the ability to add/edit/delete projects as admin, the ability to add PDF plans of a set plan type list (but due to budget constraints, no edit/delete abilities on plans currently), the ability to bid on projects as contractor (bids are automatically e-mailed to the specified e-mail address as well as entered into a database for data redundancy purposes), and the website had to have a variety of "pretty functionality" like expanding and contracting the descriptions and plan lists for each project.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver), fileZilla, Navicat MySQL
CareerNoodle
http://careernoodle.com
To view the site, you must request login information from Michael due to the site being an active business
Definitely the lengthiest project to date, CareerNoodle is a career education site targeting middle and high school students (via school subscriptions, library subscriptions, etc), I was tasked with the front-end development along with a large amount of database design, streamlining, and the ability to load on demand video and flash content throughout the site. Additionally, the site required two nationally standardized assessments, a resume builder, a custom search engine based on the O*NET search engine, several unique visualization methods, several different versions of flash video players, and a large amount of information to be filtered and formatted from a variety of sources into a single MySQL database. For the first 7 months of the site's development, I led the development and oversaw the programming of a dev intern and worked beside a designer/flash programmer to produce the site's current Beta state. I created an AJAX-based (using Mootools JS Framework's extended XHR class) assessment tool that allowed for scoring of the Interests assessment that would allow a user to navigate through the lengthy assessment and take breaks to come back and finish later. I created an in-depth and highly accurate search engine that uses a custom word dictionary and the Paice/Husk Stemming algorithm to create a weighted search value for each matching career in the database allowing for extra weighting on exact title matches. The data that was used to create the custom word dictionary was run through a series of regular expressions to create a both an XML flatfile and a MySQL database of words for the search engine to process (we experimented with both methods of searching). The final dictionaries (one for exact matches and one for stemmed matches) combined to a total of 314,000+ records to be searched through for matching the words to one of the 949 careers in our database. I also created a dynamic method for the administrators of the site to flag careers as active or inactive, allowing for nondestructive editing and filtering of their database's data. Several Javascript slide banners that I designed appear or disappear based on information gathered about the user. I created a number of functions to streamline site interactions including functions for determining career outlook scores, education scores, and job description excerpts. A variety of other PHP functions and classes were built collaboratively with the development intern for cleaning strings, integers, log-in aware redirects, and various site authentication methods including site- and user-level username/password, cookie, IP-based, and token-based authentication systems. I also wrote and designed a variety of ActionScript for the Flash designer to implement for his various Flash widgets around the site.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, Flash, ActionScript, XML
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash), Final Cut Pro, fileZilla, Navicat MySQL, MySQL Administrator Tools
Auto Image, Inc.
http://michaelkowens.com/dev/autoimageinc
To view the site in its two different forms (public vs admin), you must login with the demo credentials supplied below.
Administrator Login: demoadmin
Administrator Password: demo4auto
This website was developed over 6 weeks of off and on development and is currently still under development. There are a number of quirks with the site still, as it has not been tested in Internet Explorer yet and there are a few CSS issues to be addressed. Everything on this site was hand-coded, as I am still building up my personal code library with a variety of plug-and-play scripts that I have written. As of completion of this site, I will be able to deploy a custom PHP/MySQL based photo gallery with a rich Mootools-driven interface in under 24-hours, although there are still numerous improvements needed for this script to be competitive in the photo gallery script market.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop), fileZilla, Navicat MySQL
Joanne Zelten Foundation
http://michaelkowens.com/dev/joannezelten
This website was a 10 hour turnaround Design to CSS/XHTML website that I did for Digital Source Media in early 2008. I was given the designs in the morning and launched the site after a single set of revisions late afternoon.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop), fileZilla, Navicat MySQL, MySQL Administrator Tools
Automobile Consultation
http://michaelkowens.com/dev/automobileconsultation
To view the site in its two different forms, you must login with the demo credentials supplied below.
Administrator Login: demoadmin
Administrator Password: demo4consult
This website was a two week turnaround website in late 2007 and then revisited for a couple of days in early 2008 created under the Foliopod name. The requirements were a basic photo gallery, a few static pages, a contact form, and an appraisal order form. All were hand-coded custom for their website, and this was the first iteration of the photo gallery that I revisited with the Auto Image, Inc website.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Dreamweaver), fileZilla, MySQL Administrator Tools
This Is AWE: a writing experiment
http://thisisawe.com
This is AWE was a short lived side project that I created overnight. When it was active, each writer (21 active writers at its peak) was able to sign in and add a word to the collaborative writing project. There were rules enforced by the script to only allow each writer to post once per set time period without posting twice in a row, check some spelling and grammatical rules, and vote on active polls in the admin section. The current iteration of the site needs a considerable amount of work still, but for an overnight project, it turned out alright. I plan to resurrect the project eventually with a drastically improved word-choice algorithm as well as the ability for writers to suggest and vote on the next word. Also, I designed 5 other experiments of varying complexity that will eventually be programmed and added to the site.
Tech Used: CSS⁄XHTML, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL
Apps Used: jEdit, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Dreamweaver), fileZilla, MySQL Administrator Tools