Google Maps API

I've used the Google Maps API primarily to display the coordinates of geotagged data and also to track trips.

Here are 4 projects that I've worked on tagged Google Maps API.

derek.broox.com

April 2022

derek.broox.com is my general home page, online scrapbook, and development playground. Its primary purpose is to catalog my life and allow me to play with various APIs and web development technologies. It serves up thousands of photos, check-ins, microblogs, blogs, maps, videos, and various other data from my life. Since 2001, it has been a constantly evolving web application.

v8 - latest version

This is the first version of my site that I completely rebuilt in a new language and platform. I moved the entire site from a containerized LAMP stack to a server-side-rendered (SSR) Nuxt.js application that relies completely on the Broox API to power its content. I chose Nuxt and SSR in order to keep my SEO and open graph / social sharing meta tags intact while still providing a speedy, asynchronous client-side browsing experience.

7 previous versions

v7 November 2012

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.

v6 September 2009

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.

v5 April 2006

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.

v4 November 2004

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.

v3 September 2003

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.

v2 January 2002

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.

v1 July 2001

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

April 2011

Des Moines Alive is a personal project that my friend Nick Leeper and I built to help Des Moines Area folks find awesome local bars and restaurants. In addition to general merchant info, we provided users with aggregated data such as reviews, foursquare tips, merchant tweets, etc. We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they wanted as quickly as possible.

v2 - latest version

Nick and I decided to use this version of Des Moines Alive to learn new things, play with APIs, and switch our focus to local businesses. We built our own custom PHP MVC, with ideas borrowed from our experiences with Rails and Kohana. We redesigned our database to be more efficient. We also began using many more APIs such as SimpleGeo, Google Maps, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter to aggregate data and give our users more information.

1 previous version

v1 April 2005

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.

Dipity

September 2010

In short, Dipity was an interactive digital timeline web application with a hint of social networking. We built an incredible web-based tool that allowed users to create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive timelines that integrated video, audio, images, text, social media, geolocation and of course, accurate timestamps. Timeline viewers could pan around and zoom into these timelines for a very nice, visually engaging experience. Being that it was all built in vanilla javascript, it even worked, and was incredibly responsive, on mobile devices, ipads, etc.

v3 - latest version

Building Dipity 3 is the main reason I was hired. Version 2 was a couple years old. The design was dated, its timeline widget was built on the YUI library, and was generally inefficient. Dipity 3's goal was to update the look, improve the widget's efficiency, support HTML5 guidelines, function on mobile devices, and provide several new features. I built the front-end from the ground up, added several new features in both the front and back end (including Facebook connect, better registration process, etc), and worked closely with our other part-time engineer on the completely rewritten javascript timeline widget. I spent a lot of time making sure that the new Dipity timeline widget worked on mobile devices such as androids, iPhones, and iPads.

1 previous version

v2 January 2010

Dipity was originally a Facebook app. Version 2 was its reincarnation as a full fledged web application. It was a very impressive piece of software at the time and a huge feat to get it built. Unfortunately, I had nothing to do with any of those things... I was actually hired at Dipity to help phase out Dipity 2 and reinvent the software. During the building of Dipity 3, things on Dipity 2 obviously needed maintained. Most of my work on 2.0 was related to bug fixes, client support, updating ad providers, or updating the widget to support new video players and sources.

TowRate

October 2009

TowRate was a startup that offered a custom service to towing companies. The site allowed subscribed companies to manage their assets, map routes, and calculate profit margins for every tow. It was built in a way that allowed the towing companies to quickly run these calculations while on the phone, so they could figure out the most profitable way to charge for each tow. On this project, I was in charge of pretty much everything except for the initial design. My job involved data modeling, loads of calculations, back-end development, front-end development, form design, and deployment. TowRate was a very javascript heavy application, using plenty of asynchronous calls for things like sorting, calculating rates on the fly, and grabbing map data from the Google Maps API. The Maps API was used to help determine mileage and time for each tow. From there, the app used extensive math and formulas to help find the best price for each call. Companies were able subscribe to TowRate on a monthly or yearly basis. I integrated PayPal's Web Payments Pro to handle these subscriptions; let users join, autorenew, enter discount codes, cancel accounts, etc. Subscribed companies could also manage their trucks (as well as truck expenses), users, tow rates, tax areas, routes, etc. It provided an all around fleet management solution to any towing company.