Sites by Rob Russell at Late Night PC
The Story
This is a bio site for an academic researcher built on Drupal 6. The custom theme was developed iteratively. The client looked at a few different ideas then provided a PDF of the site as she'd like it to appear. I mapped the visual elements of the image she provided to features available in Drupal. I backed the visible elements of the site with the behaviours she described and set the site up on a test server for her to try out. She provided written descriptions of places where the site didn't work as desired. As should be expected, there were also places where something that seemed good in the original image didn't look so great once it was part of the actual site. The feedback from this discussion became requirements for the next iteration of the site. This iterative method quickly converged to a solution which allows the client to express herself clearly on a site she's comfortable with.Features
- custom theme
- twitter module
- wysiwyg editor
- RSS feeds
- bio region and bio pages
- custom content type for recipe and book discussion
Project
Most web 2.0 sites cause issues with Assistive Technology such as Screen Readers. The ATRC at the University of Toronto is actively working to improve this situation. They wanted to build an accessible web 2.0 site with community features. Collecting, sharing, rating and discussing content from the web are the basic activities enabled on the site. The project also includes a research component revolving around assessing the credibility of a site when the visual design cues are replaced with the audio rendered by a screen reader. The project was funded by a grant from Heritage Canada and is part of the CulturAll 2.0 projects at the University of Toronto.Features
- Drupal 6
- community tagging
- bookmarklets for adding and looking up content
- multi-axis content rating
- feed aggregator
- custom feed reader
- uses Views & CCK modules
- customized theme
Background
SVG is an XML language for describing graphics. This W3C standard is quite mature and has been built in to web browsers, phones, applications and other software. Despite this growth there are many more places where SVG could be part of an ideal open solution. The W3C formed an Interest Group to foster adoption of SVG.The Project
The SVG Interest Group needed a website to reach out to the broader web development community. PlanetSVG.com is that site. The site serves as a home for documentation for people learning to develop with SVG. It hosts forums where people can ask questions or discuss specifics of applications built with SVG. PlanetSVG.com is also a news hub. The site aggregates news from several sources and moderators on the site are able to choose which news items are syndicated on the main page. Blogs are provided to any users of the site who wants to post.My role
I am a member of the SVG Interest Group and as a member I volunteered to start building the website. I installed and maintain Drupal 6 as well as the contributed modules it relies on. I set up a Subversion source control repository to synchronize development of new features by other people. I integrate custom PHP scripts that are developed for this site. I also maintain the server.History
I developed an interest in SVG in 2004. The format seemed like it should find widespread application as XML gained broader acceptance for data interchange. Having done some experiments with SVG I decided to create a simple tutorial site for people who wanted to hand-code SVG. My initial version of the site was deployed as HTML but developed with my own XML language. I used Saxon for processing and syntax highlighting. I refined my process over the next couple years and eventually made a simple PHP function on the server that runs my XSLT.Features
- Online examples of handcoded SVG
- Backend uses a custom XML language and XSLT
- Custom syntax highlighting with XSLT
- XSL ransform done with custom PHP code
- GeoIP (using a PEAR library) for localized advertisements