RedBlueAmerica

Laura — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:08:11 +0000

RedBlueAmerica is a news-and-debate website we designed and developed for The E. W. Scripps Company. From the press release:

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted….

With some extensive use of CCK combined with some fancy theming, we developed a site where a neutral article can be displayed along with two opinionated articles — representing the “red” and “blue” political perspectives — that address the same topic. Also added are blogs, polls, a custom poll section called “Truth or Not?” and some less obvious features, such as private messaging.

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec’d out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up.

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled “thoughts” on the site) from the nodes (aka “posts” for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.) Also fun was coding up the custom voting widget on the main topics, which involved some custom image mapping tied in with the voting API, with some jQuery goodness thrown in for good measure.

Open Archiecture Network

lstandafer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:34:38 +0000

What is the Open Architecture Network?

The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. Here designers of all persuasions can:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons “some rights reserved” licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future

Who will the Open Architecture Network serve?

Architects, designers, engineers and anyone else involved in the building trades is welcome to share their ideas on the network - but the network is not just for professionals. Community leaders, nonprofit groups, volunteer organizations, government agencies, technology partners, healthcare workers, educators and others are also invited to collaborate on projects and share their expertise. After all if we’re to meaningfully address the challenges of building a sustainable future, we’ll need (a lot of) help from people of all walks of life.

What is our goal?

Far from replacing the traditional architect, the goal of the network is to allow designers to work together in a whole new way, a way that enables 5 billion potential clients to access their skills and expertise. The network has a simple mission: to generate not one idea but the hundreds of thousands of design ideas needed to improve living conditions for all.

Drupalcon Boston 2008 - design

RedBlueAmerica

Open Archiecture Network