LMNOpc

Portfolio

Date Completed: Jan 2001 -
Services: Everything
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, WordPress

http://www.lmnopc.com/

LMNOpc is my personal site I use to showcase the games, utilities and other projects I write in my ever-decreasing free time.

The site has recently under gone a major metamorphosis transforming a jumbled collection of disjointed pages into a monster site built using WordPress. In early 2006 I realized how powerful blogging was when working with WordPress for my weekly tech podcast, Uncompressed. After seeing how easy it was to drive traffic to a site using talkbacks and other features common to blogging packages, I kicked the conversion into gear.

There are still a few kinks to work out, and a good bit of content still orphaned by the move, but so far it’s been working extremely well.

The site gets over 10,000 visitors a month from countries around the globe.

Abblesoft.com

Date Completed: Jan 2007 – Sept 2011
Services: Application Development
Technologies Utilized: C#, .NET, Winforms, MS SQL Server, Java, Swing, PHP, MySQL, Mobile Application Development

http://abblesoft.com/

Abblesoft was my former day job. During my time there I’ve developed two commercial software products and created the web sites and most of the contents of those sites.

Convey is a software-based student response system. The purpose of Convey is to give teachers a tool allowing them to instantly see how well their students are absorbing the content being taught to them. Instead of a teacher calling out for answers, or asking students to raise their hands to respond in class, a teacher can push a question out to a classroom full of students’ computers and get 100% class participation.

The other product I work on is a Mobile Conference Program application with the name ExNav.com (short for Expo Navigator). Rather than hand out paper conference books containing schedules, maps and exhibitor information, ExNav is a mobile web application written to work on a wide variety of devices. In addition to that information, ExNav can also be used to gather session and event evaluations from the attendees right from their phone or computer.

Wishlist Buddy

Date Completed: Jan 2005 – Jan 2007
Services: Concept, design, development, hosting, etc.
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript/AJAX, PHP, MySQL, Amazon Web Services API

http://www.wishlistbuddy.com/

Wishlist Buddy is a site I created so people could save money when shopping for stuff from their Amazon.com Wish Lists.

I’ve noticed that books, DVDs and video games usually start out being priced very high and work their way down to less than half price — and in rare circumstances, it happens in under a week. I used to add items to my Amazon Wish List and wait for the prices to drop by checking them every week or so and I finally realized “why not make a site to do it for me?” and that’s where the idea for Wishlist Buddy came from.

Unfortunately, Wishlist Buddy fell victim to a change in Amazon’s shopping API, which restricted access to users’ lists. RIP Wishlist Buddy.

GameWith.Us

Date Completed: June 2005 – Now
Services: Design, development, hosting
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Google Maps API, Google Earth API, cURL, AJAX

http://www.gamewith.us/

Just like any self-respecting geek, I had to do something with the Google Maps API when it was released.

I’m part of the community over on Shacknews, a big gaming site. We regularly have Shackmeets, where a bunch of us meet up to hang out and talk about — what else — games, and even sometimes throw LAN parties and that sort of thing. Shackmap is a tool to help find other Shackers in your area.

Once I had the site working, I then integrated the ShackMap into GoogleEarth, to create ShackEarth — which is a really neat toy.

Shacknews

Date Completed: 2007
Services: Design, development
Technologies Utilized: PHP, HTML, CSS, Ajax

http://www.shacknews.com/

I did a number of projects for Shacknews.com in the fall of 2007:

I created the rotating Top Story widget on the front page of the site
Developed the backend application used by their staff to manage the site’s screenshot gallery
I wrote the Javascript behind the search box

ISTECH, Incorporated

Date Completed: Nov 2004 – Feb 2006
Services: Design & development
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript, ASP

http://www.istech-inc.com/

ISTECH Incorporated is an automated systems integration/machine builder in York, PA and the place where I spend my days.

I wanted to make sure the site communicated the technical capabilities of the company through the site’s design and I think it does a good job of doing that.

Since the redesign was completed three months ago, we’ve gone from getting about 10 inquiries a year to three a week through our web site.

Just like all the work I do, the entire site conforms to web standards and uses a CSS-based layout and HTML throughout.

KonoAudio/Shopify Project

Date Completed: April 2010
Services: Shopify Integration
Technologies Utilized: Ruby, HTML, CSS, Javascript

Kono Audio designs, develops and manufactures audio headphones and earbuds. I took their table-based web site, reimplemented the entire design using a proper CSS-based layout and integrated their site using Shopify, a very slick hosted online storefront.

Kono has different product lines, and each product line had its own unique style that I had to implement, so instead of just writing one theme that had to work, I created six. On top of that, each of Kono’s products had dozens of variants, and I wrote client-side code to display the proper images when differnt variants were chosen, and even gave them the ability to upload multiple images for each product variant.

Sadly they’ve redesigned the site, but I’m really proud of the work I did on it and got some excellent experience working in Shopify.

PrimoTech

Date Completed: 2007
Services: Design, development
Technologies Utilized: WordPress, PHP, HTML, CSS

http://www.primotechnology.com/

I was asked to create a gaming news web site. My client provided the artwork and a basic WordPress template to start with, but I did a lot of work to disguise it so it doesn’t act so much like WordPress.

Central Station

Date Completed: Dec 2005
Services: Concept, design and development
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, AJAX, ASP

Central Station was created to give Central Pennsylvania College’s marketing department an easy-to-use application for creating, editing and sending internal email publications to their faculty and staff.

I’m very proud of the user-interface for the project. It makes use of an embedded WYSIWYG text editor, and a drag-and-drop interface for organizing stories in the emails. The software makes heavy use of AJAX which makes the application behave less like a web-based application and more like a Windows application.

The goal was to make an email publishing platform someone’s mother could use, and my client was extremely happy with the result.

Uncompressed

Date Completed: Nov 2005 – 2007
Services: Design, development, hosting
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, WordPress

Uncompressed is the weekly tech/gaming podcast I do with my friend Tony Nilles and a revolving door of friends and co-hosts. I created the custom WordPress theme we’re using for the site.

One of the neat features of the site is that latest show number appears in the upper right corner of the page to make it easy for people to jump to the article about the most recent episode.

[TOC]TacOps Center

Date Completed: Jan 2003/Updated Oct 2004
Services: Design, development, hosting
Technologies Utilized: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL

http://www.tacopscenter.com/

[TOC]TacOpsCenter is the online gaming unit I play with. The purpose of the site is to give some background about the unit and some general information they’ll need to know to hop online and play on our Counter-Strike:Source game servers.

The site ties into our XMB forum, and serves as a mini-CMS, allowing members of the unit to post news items on the front page of the site without having to touch HTML or know how to FTP files.

One of the neat features of the site is a members-only page that allows members of the unit to vote on what maps to include in the game servers’ map rotation using FTP to update the remote game server.

The site also communicates with the game server to show the names of the players on the game servers. Using sockets, the site communicates with the game servers and sends commands via the remote console feature of the Half-Life game engine.