Scrolltalk.com

Last weekend, I took part in Startup Weekend West Lafayette. Together, 37 founders and myself launched Scrolltalk.com, an ironically-named startup which emphasizes a new spin on chat - linking you up with other active talkers who are discussing things you care about.

I didn't do all the development on this site. What I accomplished over the weekend was:

• Built an AJAX polling-based chat-room with prototype and php.
  
• Created a php/AJAX system for adding tags and friends.
• Created language rules with php and MySQL that helps you filter conversations to just those you're interested in.
• Created a system to generate random user accounts for guests.
• Built a regex-based system for adding and removing friends and tags with keyword shortcuts.

There's a more detailed post about the weekend here on Neat Things. Or just check out the scrolltalk tech demo and try it for yourself!

Update: We got mentioned in the Washington Post! Hurrah!

atevans.com/party

/party (pronounced "slash-party") is a subsite of my personal / professional web page that I use to notify my friends when I'm hosting an event. Basically, it got to the point where trying to call each of my friends individually to let them know they were invited to watch a movie at my place got to be a pain, and I kept forgetting people on my friends list. I decided a web application could solve this problem. So I built the /party site to let people know, by whatever method is most convienent for them, that I was doing something.

It was built in a few days with PHP and Perl - php for the page itself, the email, RSS, and txt message notification systems. Perl was used (along with the Net::OSCAR module) for notification with AOL Instant Messenger. I built an AIMbot whose away status was set to the notification message - date, time, place, and a very short description of activities. The AIMbot then keeps track of who it has notified, and messages anyone it hasn't notified, if they are online, once an hour.

Link

Innovative Automation

Innovative Automation is an Indianapolis-based company that buys, services, and sells Amada punch-presses and other industrial machinery. I set up the back end and interface using Ruby on Rails, and used a variety of creative commons and open source technology to quickly get the site up and running. The design was modified from the Midnight template, available via a Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution license from Free CSS Templates. I also made use of Lokesh Dhakar's wonderful Lightbox v2 script for image display, and Anssi Piirainen's FlowPlayer for product videos.

The result of using these open-source and creative commons technologies was that Innovative Automation got a high-quality web site with an easy-to-use backend within a month. The interface allows the client to handle updating product details, uploading product images, creating slideshows to demonstrate their service capabilities, and uploading videos to display their products in action.

Inno-auto.com

Robert and Carol's Wedding

This was a site requested by a family member who wanted to create a centralized location for tracking all the various things relating to their upcoming wedding. The site is currently only a prototype made with Ruby on Rails. The backend is a secured version of the rails pre-constructed scaffolding. The upshot of all this is that the entire site as-is was built in three days flat, and the demo was posted for my client shortly thereafter.

Demo Wedding Page

Webcomica

A webcomic hosting application I created in Ruby on Rails. I had several friends asking if I knew any good places to host webcomics, and I did not know of any such places. So, I took about two weeks to build this application in Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, most of my friends lost interest and the time necessary to work on web comics, but I left the application up in case it became useful.

Live Demo

Purdue Game Development Club

The Purdue Game Development Club needed a webmaster, so I decided to get a page up and running before I applied. To do so, I created a layout, set up phpBB, and created a php frontend to interface the two. I set up some announcements threads, and made our layout display those on the main page in a pretty nice format. Ultimately, the club voted to go with another web designer, who created the page that is the current incarnation, which uses static HTML. I did, however, get to create an RSS interface for their phpBB board, so that they would have some kind of dynamically-updating announcements.

Live demo

Archmagus.us

A small, CRUD-capable portfolio site before I owned the atevans.com domain name. Written in php, with a CSS liquid layout and file / image uploading capabilities, Archmagus.us served as a perfectly adequate portfolio site from 2004-2007. The site is still live for archive purposes, and can be seen at the link below.

Archmagus.us Archived Version