Sybex

Sybex has always been one of my favorite computer reference brands. I was happy when Wiley acquired them so I could get discounts on the books. Now I'm also happy that I could contribute to the website. For the past few months, the development team in Indianapolis has been working on a redesigned site, updating the previous one which was in a very old style. It wasn't even 1024x768 yet! We used a lot of jQuery to make the navigation rich and compatible across browsers and platforms. It also helped in customizing around the restrictive template we were working with.

The template we were moving Sybex into is a mini-site that actually lives in Wiley.com. Many of the past ones visually look like part of Wiley, but with Sybex, we used a lot of style overrides and inserts to really make it stand alone. The dominant dark colors take the attention away from the green Wiley tab in the upper right. And the techie community will appreciate the nice graphics and visual effects. The new site also does a great job of highlighting all of the titles.

Click here to visit the new Sybex

Dummies Videos on iOS

A couple of weeks back, Dummies.com added a quiet update. There's now a JavaScript detecting iOS and Android mobile devices whenever a video page is accessed. When detected, it'll switch to an HTML5 video player (rather than the default Flash one). Now users accessing Dummies videos on the iPhone or iPad won't get a blank box or error. This is a very useful update because the iPad is a great tool for how-to instructions, which Dummies.com has a lot of.

Android users probably won't notice a difference because those devices were already able to play the Flash version. It just serves up HTML5 if Flash is not installed.

MoMA 2011

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Museum of Natural History

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More Launch Announcements

CliffsNotes
This site was recently redesigned to have a more modern look. CliffsNotes was already the right width, but it needed some color and layout changes to keep up with its competition. Though I worked on some tweaking of this site, my work was primarily on the standalone mobile version. It was the first Wiley to go fully mobile, so it was fun to research and try out what methods worked best.
Click here to visit CliffsNotes

eLS
eLS, or Encyclopedia of Life Sciences was a very similar project to Comprehensive Physiology. It had identical component types, but a different design. This went along very smoothly as I learned a lot from the previous project and also took jQuery and CSS classes just before starting.
Click here to visit eLS

My WileyPLUS
The largest relaunch of all was WileyPLUS. It involved a login system, a customizable account for students & instructors and a homepage server move. There were so many moving parts and different groups involved that we had to kick this one off on a Saturday with some cleanup on Sunday. I worked primarily on frontend JavaScript/jQuery/CSS for My WileyPLUS and the homepage.
Click here to visit WileyPLUS

Highline Preview

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This post was titled "Preview" because the photos were shot with an HTC Incredible smartphone. Hopefully this will get reworked with a better camera later this Summer. Stay tuned!

Statue of Liberty on Schmap

Check out my Statue of Liberty photo on Schmap...

http://newyork.schmap.com/attractions/statue_of_liberty?pn=333

It was picked last year when the site launched. Schmap is a location technology service provider and local publisher, with cutting-edge expertise at the intersection of local, social, commercial and the real-time web.

Donations to Japan

Friday's earthquake and tsunami permanently shifted Japan's coastline by a good 8ft. The country will still experience several aftershocks to come, so it will be a difficult recovery. I went through my list of relief organizations and personally link-checked all of them to make sure they had a way of donating to this specific disaster:

• AmeriCares
• ADRA
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Inc.
• Church World Service
• Episcopal Relief and Development
• Food for the Hungry
• International Orthodox Christian Charities
• Lutheran World Relief
• MercyCorps
• Medical Teams International
• Operation USA
• Oxfam International
• Plan USA
• Project Hope
• UMCOR
• World Relief
• World Vision

Thank you.

SketchyCards

Kim Yeo just opened up an Online shop @ Etsy where customers can now buy reproductions of her work on sets of 6 greeting cards. Works range from sketches to complete watercolors.

Etsy stores have built-in RSS feeds, which came in handy for quickly building a low maintenance presence on Kimengyeo.com. ColdFusion was used to parse the RSS and jQuery to style the content data within the feed.

Click here for SketchyCards

Pfeiffer

Almost immediately after the Comprehensive Physiology launch, the Pfeiffer redesign went up. The old version was falling out of date with it's compact 800x600 design. While the version that launched wasn't a full redesign, it looks like it visually because of the width change and modern color palette.

Work on this site included reskinning an existing site with minimal recoding. The homepage and few main pages were the only ones built completely from scratch. The new pages are clean XHTML/CSS and the rest of the site is legacy code enclosed in XHTML. The navigation involved some light jQuery.

Click here to visit Pfeiffer