Todd A

We just launched drivinncryin.com. The site is a project of StrategicBlend. I was hired by them to build the WordPress theme from a PSD created by Bryan Novak.

I recently completed work on terriclark.com. The site was designed by Laura Holder. StrategicBlend hired me to create the WordPress theme for the site.

Just launched a new site, geeklink.org to cover Comic-Con and more. The idea is a social media, crowd-sourced site where geeks can chat about events during the events.

I just wrapped up work on amysfoster.com — the personal site of a Nashville author. My friend Laura Holder did the graphic design and I did the code. I sliced the PSD, wrote the XHTML and CSS and installed and configured WordPress to run the site.

Amy’s site has a couple of cool features. Instead of a blog area, we’re using the SimplePie RSS parsing engine to consume her Twitter feed on the front page. We’re also using SimplePress:Forum to run a full-featured forum on her site.

WordCrowd came about after conversations with my friend Taylor Trask regarding our desire to see one independently maintained, crowd-sourced resource for all things WordPress. We both use WordPress as our CMS of choice and are often frustrated when searching for solutions to problems we encounter. Because blogs tend to rely on the model of archiving everything, we find a lot of out-of-date material. For that reason, we started WordCrowd as a wiki. Ideally, the site will be maintained by ourselves and our users to keep our articles as fresh as possible.

I built HumanOptions.org based on a design comp. I sliced the PSD, created the XHTML and CSS and configured WordPress to run the site. We’ve got quite a few cool twists to the normal WordPress set-up working to run the site. We wanted to make nearly every section of the site update-able by the client. It was a very cool project to work on.

I helped my friend Siobhan Miller create StockPhotoFail.com. The site is a blog where she details various stock photo searches gone horribly wrong.

I advised her on the setup, installed WordPress and several free themes and instructed her own how to use the software. Siobhan does everything else.

I created Ask Miss September for a friend. My role was largely advisory. I configured the WordPress install and we chose a free theme for the design.

I helped a friend created Unlocked GSM for his business. I installed Magento ecommerce software on the site, helped him configure it and advised on other best practices for the site.

More than just a simple revamp of NashvilleZine.com, NashvilleZine.org embodies a new approach to social media. The .com site that I shut down in 2006 was largely reactionary — a response to what I thought was lacking in local media at the time. Since then, I’ve become convinced that establishment media can’t become new web media. The new Zine is a positive assertion that a community can cover and report on itself better than a bureaucratized institution.

The Give Up and Use Tables project is a nerdy (but totally practical) inside joke developed by the Creative team at echo during my time there. What’s even nerdier is that we actually built it. It’s a tool to remind us when we’ve argued enough with CSS. If you’re a developer, you may appreciate this.

Here’s the brief recap:
It’s a joke, people.

Here’s the full story:
Several months ago, a friend and I built a site based around a very nerdy inside joke we had at work. A code issue that web designers often face is making a layout work in all browsers using only CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Using CSS is the standard, proper, acceptable way to create a website’s layout. An out-dated method of creating websites’ layouts involves a bit of HTML called a table. Tables, for all their clumsiness, tend to work more consistently across browsers than CSS. Tables also do things like vertically align content to the bottom of a cell while CSS will only do this in conjunction with JavaScript.

Of course, there’s a huge logical problem with using tables for layout: the layout of a site is not actually tabular data. And we coders don’t like that bit of bad logic. Also, while tables solve the initial layout problem, they are significantly harder to update.

That said, there often comes a time while coding a site when a designer might entertain the wish to give up and use tables. So we made a site based around that frustration we felt when browsers wouldn’t obey our CSS. Brian created a flash widget that gives a designer 47 minutes to wrestle with CSS. After that time, the widget buzzes and provides the table code for the designer to use.

The whole thing was a joke that we just got bored enough to execute. But here’s where the story gets interesting: After sitting dormant for 9 months, suddenly someone found the site. And not just someone but a very popular code blog called Ajaxian. In one day the site’s visitors leapt from 0 to 400. The next day the site was picked up by a reddit user. At the end of the day, we had about 35,000 visitors.

The Google Analytics graph tells the story:

Impressive, huh?

More impressive is that within one day my Google Page Rank shot up to a 5. And while the instant popularity of the site caused envy in my friends who wished their sites could get 35,000 visitors in one day, I knew it wouldn’t last. Friends encouraged me to put Google Ads on the site, make t-shirts, anything. “This could be another dramatic hamster, Todd!”

But I declined. Give Up and Use Tables is a pretty pure form of internet meme. It’s a site that does one thing: execute a really nerdy joke. We had our day — literally one day — and that was it.

Or to put it another way:

The long graph shows the decline and fall:

It was a fun 24 hours. Golden State even received several referrals from the wave of traffic that hit the site. There are some lessons to draw from this on internet trends, viral marketing, and link-sharing. But I’m still basking in the fun of our joke entertaining so many people (and even inciting real argument). And while Brian and I might have let the domain lapse and the site disappear, Golden State has taken over hosting and will keep it as a geeky museum piece.

So if you’ve ever felt cross-browser frustration with CSS, feel free to succumb to your urge and Give Up and Use Tables.

UPDATE 20 May 2009: since I penned this explanation in November 2008, the site has been hit several more times with massive traffic. It maintains about 150 visitors per day.

While at echo, I worked on a project to standardize our Street Marketing offerings on the web. Bon Jovi was the first Street Team to use our product. I designed the UI and a graphic designer created the skin.

Prior to this effort each Street Team had different modules in our CMS and used them different ways. Also each Street Team section of a site was hacked together to fit within the framework of the normal site. We created a standard offering of modules and a standard UI so that future Street Teams could be deployed with minimal effort.