After learning about responsive web design during the Obama campaign, I rebuilt the front-end of derek.broox.com to be leaner and work better on mobile devices. I also dockerized the application so that I could more easily spin it up on my dev machines and deploy it to new hosts.

This version of my site was built to make my blog a bit less prominent and focus more on my internet presence as a whole. This is also where I really began experimenting with geodata and APIs like Flickr, Twitter, Brightkite, Foursquare, and Facebook.

After working with Truespin Media on several professional sites, I finally felt I gained enough experience to completely rewrite derek.broox.com. I didn't want to rewrite the site until I was absolutely sure that I was writing extremely solid code that would actually make the site function better - not just look different. Visually there isn't a whole lot of difference between this release and version 4, however the back-end was completely rewritten. With the complete recoding of the site I greatly enhanced several features. A few of the those include: content tagging, photo handling, database calls, and paging. This version of the site is much much lighter, much quicker, and a lot more clean.

This version of derek.broox.com was simply a reason to learn more about design with Cascading Style Sheets. Though this design did include a couple back-end changes, I focused mainly on design. I definitely accomplished what I set out for in that I learned a great deal about using CSS effectively. Major back-end code additions included tagging and paging for photos. Throughout this design's life there were several add-ons made. Some were back-end changes, most were content changes.

This version of derek.broox.com was mostly just content and design changes. I tried to simplify the design a bit while adding much more content, including audio, videos, a biography, and links to my friends' sites. One cool addition was that on the homepage I made the random photo of myself change to photos of friends when you hovered over links to their websites.

Version 2 of derek.broox.com was the first version of my blog on the subdomain: derek.broox.com. Prior to that my blog resided at www.broox.com. This version was mostly just content and design changes. I added some random photo functionality to the site that would load random pictures of me in the homepage header, and random pictures of other things on other pages. Other than that, not much changed between the first version and this version.

Before I started Broox Extreme, my personal site resided at broox.com. This was my very first PHP driven personal site and blog. It was also the home of my first random picture generator which displayed new images on the side each time a page would load.

Des Moines Alive is a personal project that Nick Leeper and I developed to help Des Moines Area people find new and cool places to go. We focused primarily on restaurants and bars but also gave information about local sports and recreation. The main feature was to allow visitors to review any of the locations listed. We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they need as quickly as possible. At a year old the site was getting thousands of hits daily and had hundreds of reviews submitted. Des Moines Alive was also featured in local print media.