Hello Collecta

Daniel Miller’s web-type work.

Hacker? Certainly. Faker? Only if it is an absolutely necessary first step in getting to Maker.

Suggest-o-matic.

SWIM was a CMS I built in 2004/2005 that from a product design standpoint, I am still really proud of. Unfortunately the code needs serious refactoring and some AJAXification would be nice, too. In the meantime I’ve, like many, spread my CMing across multiple sites, and I’m at once more interested in managing all those disparate sources and simplifying to a single white box (hence SOM). (I even created a SWIMLite which was [for the most part] a fancy white box, no-admin-interface [to speak of] CMS…if by “created” I mean 90%.)

I’m scouring a backup hard drive looking for more things to show, and everything was either proprietary or I came into the project late and cleaned up after someone (this is also what 99% of my current job entails, however in this case that means cleaning up from 2001–XSLs that parse 2M of XML and dynamically write JS that then, once shipped to an unsuspecting browser, dynamically write inappropriate tables, inline styles, and other horrendous markup). It has been in cleaning up others’ design and code that I have come to realize my strength is understanding how all the front-end parts fit together: how to structure markup for easy JS manipulation and AJAXification, and how to then manipulate said markup and communicate with back-end systems.

In the last year I learned Flex, as it made the most sense as a technology choice in the current architecture (see parenthetical description in the previous paragraph)–that is, the technology choice that made the furthest leap from present antipatterns. Unfortunately my ability to maintain and build upon said existing system has caused me to be drug away from Flex so frequently that we have yet to ship anything in the framework (although we are close).

My strength at being able to do most everything is also my greatest weakness: I’m not a super-ninja at any given discipline, but my overall smarts and aesthetic sensibilities find me working on everything all at once, in the middle of many discussions and processes, making sense and communicating for all the various parties and technologies involved, and making sure that in the end magic has happened.

There is plenty more about me on the internets. My art section has little code experiments (although the best aren’t done, they sit in the workshop forever). I’ve built twitter bots for sugarfilled and pavdog although neither are running right now, and the coolest one was for twitturgy which had all kinds of interesting rules based on what was being tweet @ it. (Twitter stuff was all in PHP.)

A good place to get an idea for my general design sensibilities and see older site designs is my graphic set on Flickr…Nonlinear is also a place to get an idea of what gets me excited from a design standpoint.

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