The Portfolio of Derek Brooks

Solid Grind

Screenshot of Solid Grind
SolidGrind is a personal project that I developed as an extreme sports / soap shoes promotional and community website. It's the predecessor of my former Broox Extreme (www.broox.com) and BrooksFSW community sites. After I came up with the name and domain, I decided that rather than customizing a prebuilt system, I wanted to build this site from scratch. Developing the entire site myself was another great learning experience and paid off numerous times; I had full control and a great understanding of the system, so I could easily add on, fix bugs, and rebuild sections. One of the more fun parts of SolidGrind was the "feature pic" system. It allowed users to upload photos to be reviewed by the administrators that I'd hired. The uploaded photos were queued in a database and could be viewed/approved by administrators. Upon approval, the website would automatically size/scale the image, add a SolidGrind.com watermark to it, create a thumbnail, store it in the database, and feature the picture on the homepage until a new photo was chosen. In addition, I designed it so that each picture had to be featured for at least 24 hours; this gave everyone a fair amount of time on our front page. Besides photos, the site featured news, forums, tutorials, videos, and several other things related to extreme sports.

v2 - latest version

In 2006, I re-released Solid Grind to get away from publishing broader extreme sports content and focus on the grind shoe scene. There were so many other extreme sports sites with a full staff dedicated to maintaining them, but no one had this thorough of a website dedicated to the grind shoe scene. I worked with Nicole Sutherland on the design of this version, which turned out great for the content being delivered. The new version of the site was much more complete, the code was much more efficient, and photo manipulation was handled much better. With the initial version of SolidGrind I was very proud of the photo management system - this system was much cleaner and much more versatile in that most image manipulation was handled on the fly.