Slight design tweaks on Google Maps

I just noticed that Google has a slightly new look for Map. I'm not sure if I like it. It's the first time that my eyes have progressed down to the ad listing. Usually I hardly notice the ad placements, but this new, blocky layout was different...dono if I like it.

Going to SXSW!

I found out this morning that I'll be going to South by South West. I expressed some interest in going last November, but with the state of the economy, I didn't think I'd be going. But to my pleasant surprise, I now have plane, hotel, and conference tickets. The interactive conference overlaps with film, but I'm going to miss the music. Now it's time to select the seminars I'd like to attend...

Erin's New Job!

Erin was formally offered a full time position at Matec, the Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center. She's been working there part time since early December. Yay!

Israel!

Erin and I both got a free trip to Israel from Shorashim!!!  We depart on the 5th of January but we'll likely extend our trip to tour Egypt.

Vegas Sports

Sports had the same concept as music, but was still a big project.  This screenshot has it all.  This casino has an upcoming event, a news story, and highlights.  Instead of some javascript motion for the 'Overtime Guaranteed' (auxillary) content, Sports uses a 3-D papervision scoreboard.  Very Cool.

Vegas Sports

Vegas Music

The music project for the LVCVA was an effort not only to make people more keenly aware of the music scene in Vegas, but also to show them what else is happening around the show.  The concept of Play Louder is to show how Vegas takes further or louder than any other city in the world.  Now for the tech goodness.

Music is heavy with fast moving ajax.  That's almost a given, but what you can't see behind this scenes is the full blown CMS (Drupal core) that we implemented to associate and augment existing data.  We also worked with a 3rd party to integrate the artist bios.

It was quite an undertaking and quite an achievement.

Vegas Music

Vegas Right Now

Vegas Right Now - go.

This campaign has been under constant evolution since it launched in March.  I chose to highlight it only because it has been through so many iterations.  It first went live as a very simple, almost static page.  It's since evolved into a house for several sweepstakes, and most recently because a fully content managed page.  :)

VRN

My Vegas

We launched My Vegas.  It's a closed social networking site and was my first large project at CM.  It was a titanic amount of work and code, but now it's done.

I'm particularly proud of the galleries, message board, themes, and use of ajax, and...well all of it really.  It was a great learning experience and portfolio project.  It's a project that's never finished though we rarely find time to work on it.

It was designed in tandem with RSVP - The Vegas Planner, an all flash trip planner.  Ideally there would have been deeper integration between the two, but we didn't really get that far.

Check out My Vegas when you have a chance.

I'd like to point out that it's a closed network.  This means that you have to be invited and there's no way to search through other users that you're not already friends with.  An open network was deemed a content/liability concern for the client.

Happy Wednesday

Sarcastic Wednesday - courtesy of Hallmark

Working...forever

I worked most of the weekend. I'm not going to complain per se. I take great pride in the site we're developing, but I'm getting to the point where I want to see it done. It's at the point of an alpha release, and will be at the modern definition of beta in a couple weeks. I'm just so anxious to be able to showoff my work to everyone who can't see my personal dev environment.