Here’s a quick list of the things I’ve been working on, in no particular order.

• JobScout
  A digital literacy teaching platform. The plans and concept were done in conjunction with Christina and Stephanie at REALPOLITECH, and I designed and developed the first phase of the app itself in two months. This is what will take up the majority of my time in 2012, hopefully.
• The Daily Digi
  Ground up re-write of the member management software to fit the specific needs of Steph, the digital scrapbooking empress. Tons of custom functionality so that she can interact with her members precisely how she wants, all written to be compatible with the membership database of the old system without disrupting the users’ experience.
• UNAC/UHCP
  Another REALPOLITECH client, this site’s massive infrastructure has been steadily expanded to include a store with coupons, optional splash pages, an events calendar, and easy ways to manage the metric ton of information the site has.
• Angel-K9
  A dog training academy website with a customized class scheduler that automatically creates class rosters with information the trainers need and is easily manageable by the office staff.
• LGJF
  A student-run online publication for the University of San Francisco. A content-first design, with cool little touches like pull-quotes and different types of tags for content. The content slider on the main page is also customizable for each post, making it easier for them to make each one look great.

That’s all I have time to tell you about now. I have every intention of finishing the update to Out To Lunch’s layout and make it easier for me to add descriptions of the things I’ve been doing.

The houses available for rent in Colorado are, by and large, breathtaking. What I can’t understand is why so many of these magnificent properties are rented through stock-and-trade websites like VRBO. I don’t imagine the owners of these places are very happy with the bland taste left in their potential renters’ mouths after they look through a few thumbnail pictures, surrounded by drab text and Google ads for ski rentals.

The Elk House owners wanted to stand out from the pack, and while they will still show up on sites like VRBO (their Google search ranking is simply too high to ignore) they now have a much better place to send potential renters: their custom website with a custom reservation system.

Once the pictures from the wedding come in, the information about the wedding itself will be replaced with a slide-show, so anyone can re-visit the memories of the wedding anytime they choose.

Just a small change would be needed; there are two cabins, which can be rented together or separately. I could add a little piece of functionality to the calendar, where someone could choose which cabin they wanted. Easy, right?

Whoo boy. Am I sorry I promised I could deliver quickly on that.

I wound up having to rebuild the system almost from scratch, doing some stream-lining and IE compatibility testing. (Did you know that if you use counter or oneweek as a global Javascript variable it breaks your site in IE? I didn’t.) Also, the price of each night is now dependent on your length of stay, not when you want to stay (which is how Elk House works). So there’s a list of suggested stay lengths over to the left, each of which is linked to the actual date in the calendar.

All told, the additional functionality took an extra 10 hours or so to build, but it did uncover a flaw in the way the calendar script knew what the next month was. Instead of selecting the literal “next month”, it would find the “month 30 days from now.” It worked most of the time, so long as the current day wasn’t the 28th – 31st day of the month. If it was, months would get skipped because they didn’t have that many days in them. Ridiculous.

Revealing this glitch helped fix the Elk House calendar, because they’re both based on the same script. Eternal learning, I guess.

Luckily, the back-end of the system is nearly identical and only required one small change.

Another lucky break – the place is beautiful and serene, and I was able to take the pictures myself. Good pictures can make any layout sing, and it’s hard to take bad pictures of that place.

Visit the site.

Also, lots of bright colors in this layout. It’s not that I hate color, it’s just that I’m afraid of it. It scares me to death. The wrong colors can ruin an otherwise good layout, and my lack of experience with it was something that kept from using it a lot. I’m happy with where it wound up, so I guess next time I don’t have to be so a-skeered.

The last “new thing” I did for this site was come up with a JavaScript function for the animations. (They’re not on the site yet; we’re still working on them). Because Eri’s a stop-motion animator, I wanted a way to animate frames of transparent PNGs (GIF transparencies are just the worst).

By creating a transparent PNG with the frames evenly spaced and applying a JavaScript function to it, walk cycles are really easy to create. Check it out:

$(function(){

	function getNextFrame(framePositions, selector, frames, width){
		var currentFrame = $(selector).find('img').css('left');
		var currentFrame = currentFrame.replace('px', '');
		var currentFrame = -(currentFrame)/width;

		var nextFrame = currentFrame + 1;

		if (direction == 0){

			newFrame = framePositions[nextFrame];

			if (newFrame == undefined){
				nextFrame = currentFrame -1;
				newFrame = framePositions[nextFrame];
				direction = 1;
			}

		} else {

			nextFrame = currentFrame -1;
			newFrame = framePositions[nextFrame];

			if (nextFrame == -1){
				nextFrame = currentFrame  + 1;
				newFrame = framePositions[nextFrame];
				direction = 0;
			}

		}

		$(selector).find('img').css({left: framePositions[nextFrame]});

	}

	function stopMotion(selector, frames, width, height, fps){

		var speed = 1000/fps;

		$(selector).css({overflow: 'hidden', height: height+'px', width: width+'px', position: 'absolute'});
		$(selector).find('img').css({position: 'absolute', left:0});

		var framePositions = Array();
		for (i=0; i