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  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • Holy City Farms

    HolyCityFarms

    An old friend of mine contacted me a while back about helping him design a logo, banner, and building a website for his new tomato business. The good news for me is that I’ll have all the tomatoes I can ever eat, because over the years I’ve learned that I prefer to do business with family and friends only on a trade out basis. My buddy graduated college with a computer science degree and worked quite a number of years as a software developer before diving head first into hydroponic farming of heirloom tomatoes. Aside from my experience, he might have contacted me because of my love of a good home grown tomato. Many years ago I started a Facebook group about growing tomatoes where he was a member and I was able to watch him scale up from a small hobby greenhouse to thousands of square feet of automated hydroponic goodness. Needless to say, this one was all my pleasure to build. It took me a couple days on the logo and graphics and a couple days on the site itself. I hope this website will serve him well until he’s ready to start shipping or automating the processing of orders. Until then, you can taste his tomatoes at some of the better restaurants in Charleston and at the John’s Island Farmers Market. I hope his business can really scale up sustainably and I know I’m going to be stopping by for a visit every time I’m in town.

    You can visit the website at www.holycityfarms.com

    HCF-devices

  • Notes on Rebuilding

    I’ve recently put a little bit of my holiday time into rebuilding this website. It’s almost been online for ten years and I figured it could use a little overhaul.

    Here’s the Git Repo

    I’ll just going to make some notes on it here:

    I built a little video chat application that allows anyone to connect with me from my homepage. I’ve added a setting that allows me to set when I’m online. If that is set on, a small notification comes up on my home page that asks if the visitor would like to connect. If they press yes, I am sent a text message which appears on my phone and computer screens. The visitor is given a loading message while I get connected to the chat. I am using Node.js, Express, and WebRTC.io for the video chat application. I am using Twilio for the SMS notifications and the STUN server via this post. Only Chrome and Firefox support it now, but it’s only a matter of time before Safari and mobile browsers follow suit. I built a little API that counts the active connections and emits a JSON string. The website attempts to read this 5 times, 5 seconds apart. If I get connected, the visitor is connected. It’s fun. My first chat was from a random visitor in Italy. It’s a bit like chat roulette in that way. I’ll add in form to ask who they are before I get sent the SMS later on. Twilio is so cheap I can’t believe how much I pay for unlimited texting with AT&T… I might also route those through Twilio later on. 

    function poll_dave() {
   var x = 0;
   var countTimer = setInterval(function() {
      if (x > 5) { clearInterval(countTimer) }
      else if (x == 5) { dave_not_available() }
      else {
         var URLchatAPI = "http://macs.local:8080/status";
         var request = $.ajax({
            url: URLchatAPI,
            dataType: 'json',
            cache: false, 
            success: function (data) {
               online = data.online;
                  if (online=='yes') {
                     $('.chat').modal('show');
                     x = x+5;
                  };
                  if (online=='no') {
                     dave_connecting();
                  };
            },
            error: function ( xhr, tStatus, err ) {
               dave_error();
               x = x+5;
            }
         });
      x++;
      }
   }, 5000);
});
    Third Party Dependence:

    One of the main reasons I built the video chat was because I was tired of using my Google Apps accounts for chat and video chat. An in that same vein, I’ve also put in my own hosted analytics using Piwik. Here is public facing analytics page. It has a nice little mobile app too. I also try to use as little as possible third party code. There are only three third party plugins running. I am using Gravity Forms, Mandrill for email, and Askimet for spam.

    Speeding it up:

    I put some thought into migrating everything over to a static file system, Ghost or another Javascript based system. I kinda wanted to stay loyal to WordPress since this site started there. I did however built this theme to make use of the WP-API and Backbone which means that I could always add a new front end whenever I’m ready. The infinite scroll is powered by Backbone. I’m sure that Socket.io is somewhere in the future since Automattic started maintaining it when they acquired CloudUp. I am also moving over to a Nginx and Redis cacheing system as I migrate to a new host. Even though my queries are tiny, I still find the half second lag pretty painful.

    ROI:

    Since almost all of my work comes from direct referrals, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to market myself. Because of that, I’ve had the luxury of really not paying any attention to my own website. However, I have wanted to streamline some of my workflow and communications. And because of that, I’ve built a client billing and project management into this site. I am still using a clone of Basecamp called Project Pier, but I have now integrated that into the billing user management of this site.

    Actually Posting Content:

    Much like I’ve just posted these notes, I’m gonna start posting other fun stuff online. This may be a bad decision as it means that I’ll be sharing these postings elsewhere. I rarely log into any social networks and I’ve found it helps simplify my attention and keeps my focus at home. What really inspired me to do this was the fact that I’ve been reading all of the recent “Best Albums of 2014” from various publishers and I keep complaining to my better half about how bad they are and thinking to myself that I should post my own. So I built a page to keep up with all of the music I listen to at https://davidwindham.com/studio/music

  • Can’t Buy Me Love

    After 10 years, we tied the proverbial knot. I built a fun little site to let some folks know our plans. I’ve left the site up if you want to check it out – https://davidwindham.com/bml/

  • Putt’n it back together.

    I decided I’d reclaim everything I posted anywhere else online by getting them back onto this site manually. Somewhere along the line I started posting more to third party sites than my own. I think I’m going to change that habit. I’ll publish it all here so I have an archive. I stopped posting to third party sites about two years ago now and I haven’t published anything here in several years either.

  • Pennebaker Hegedus Films

    D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus are academy award winning documentary filmmakers. I was lucky to have the opportunity to build them a new website.

    phfilms-thumb

    I had also previously built them a website for their film The Kings of Pastry. I really enjoyed working on this one because I had access to a lot of their original film footage. And these are things I really enjoy like David Bowie and Bob Dylan. One particular image of Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire had a particular amount of significance to me because I had an argument with my high school art teacher over it. She had used a projector to trace the image onto a canvas to draw I had asked her if it was really art if she was just reproducing someone else’s image. Needless to say, that teacher and I didn’t get along. She turned me off from art for years and I’m sure she’d be interested to know I have the original image provided by the original filmmaker. The thing D.A. Pennebaker said to me when we first got started was that he really liked the icon of Fats Waller I used as my social media profiles. It’s a small world out there and I had original gotten referred to them through a relative of theirs in Aiken who’m I met because I was down there working on a site for the World Bicycle Polo association. Anyway, they were very easy to work with and were graciously accommodating to my recommendations.

    I built the entire site using WordPress. It features a good amount of custom post and data types to allow granular control for over each page and film. Here’s a screenshot of the Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars page where you can see the multiple data fields. I even created some data fields to individualize and control the styling and color theme of each individual film page.

    You can take a look at http://phfilms.com

  • Sturgill Simpson

    Yeah, this fella has it going on. He released a new album last month that’s sure to gain some listeners.

  • National Dropout Prevention Network

    The National Dropout Prevention Network is part of the department of Health, Human Services, and Education at Clemson University.

    The website is built in Drupal and integrates National Dropout Prevention Resources database. I inherited an early version and worked on it while employed by Clemson University. The resources database contains the largest network of Dropout Prevention resources in the country. I integrated a radio webcast from Clemson Media Productions, created e-newsletter system, added an e-commerce system, and built an separate e-learning platform for delivering research to educators around the world using Drupal.

  • Engage

    The International Journal of Research and Practice on Student Engagement at Clemson University.


    Engage

    I built this website using WordPress while employed by Clemson University. Educators love their acronyms. The site allow department staff to easily copy and paste content into the website within the existing print production workflow. The site is a great way to modernize traditional peer reviewed academic journals. The goal is to garner more attention and submissions by being online. Aside from the custom theme and the multiple author features, there is very little custom work or plugins which means it should be sustainable for many years to come. I designed the theme to match the existing print publication.

  • Education Next

    Education Next is the publication of the Harvard University Kennedy School Program on Education Policy and Governance.

    ednext

    I worked with Use All Five Inc. out of Venice Beach California to build this website. It is built on top of WordPress and uses BuddyPress for social features. The most challenging part of the build was bringing in all of the existing publications data from a proprietary CMS. The funniest part of this project is when I had to stay up almost all the way through the night working because I had made a breaking change to the site the day before they were having a press conference to announce the new website. The project took me a several months to build and I’m proud of the advanced features and layout. The designs I was given were relatively complex and involved a lot of custom CSS. There was also a lot of custom PHP to make the staggered queries for the magazine style layout, the multi author workflow, and the social aspects.

    Part of the challenge in this project was instructing everyone how to use the site. I made template keys for how each section of the content is controlled. You can click on this image to take a closer look.

    I’ve been saying to folks that it’s about the only way I’d ever be given access to Harvard because it certainly wasn’t from my academic achievements.

  • Kings of Pasty

    I recently built a website for the upcoming release of the film Kings of Pastry. Having spent a number of years in the culinary and wine world, I really appreciated the film. It’s a real life look at how hardcore French culinary programs really are. The site is compact and simple and tries to stay with the design ethos of the film. Take a look at http://kingsofpastry.com