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.

Loffredo is a high-end produce company serving much of the Mid West. When our company was hired to rebuild their site, my assignments were to integrate our in-house SiteMan CMS, create some plugins, build in a fancy javascript fruit carousel, and of course deploy the site to our production server. The plugin I built for this site simply allowed Loffredo to manage branches and employees and allow site visitors to contact them. The fruit carousel I mentioned was a custom javascript animation that cycles through various fruits on the homepage.

SiteMan is a Content Management System that we built at Red 5 Interactive. It was originally built so that mall property owners could manage each of their mall property's websites. However, once we realized how powerful our system was, we decided to generalize the app so that we could deploy it for all of our clients. We rebuilt SiteMan to allow our clients to easily manage a single website or a group of websites. This way, a parent company could edit any of their child company websites, while employees of the child companies would only be able to see and manage their respective site. The front-ends of the sites managed by SiteMan were also completely extracted from SiteMan itself, which was great for 2 reasons. First of all, it allowed us to more easily keep all of our clients' systems up-to-date in that we were just updating SiteMan and not touching their presentation layer. Secondly, it also allowed us to launch new campaigns and designs for clients very quickly without touching the content management system. When we deployed SiteMan for a client it came with a core group of tools like user management, web page editing, file management, audit logs, etc. From there, custom tools could be added as plugins. These tools included functionality like, announcements, events, careers, photo galleries, stores, social networking, etc. We also built SiteMan in a way that allowed users to customize their tool layout. Any user could pick which tools they used the most and arrange them in a way to get a quick snapshot of the exact data that they were interested in. Tools could be added, removed, or sorted at any time - and everything remained just as they left it on their next visit. This application was very Javascript heavy, making extensive use AJAX, dialog windows, and WYSIWYG editing. As such, we had minimal page loads which provided a very streamlined experience for our clients. I am very proud and excited to have worked with such a great team on this app. It was so versatile and simple to keep pushing forward.

Glimcher is a premier real estate investment trust that manages malls and shopping centers across the United States. They came to my company, Red 5 Interactive, seeking a corporate website. My company had already built and launched this site by the time I began working on it, so my job was simply to enhance some features on both the admin and the front-end. Glimcher wanted a near real-time display of their stock price on the homepage. However, there weren't any great services to grab this information at the time, so I built a CRON scheduled script to scrape a couple quote sites and grab their stock price. Whenever the price was successfully grabbed, the price was written to a local file that was read by the website. Glimcher also wanted real-time stats on their leasing informational pages, so I added some functionality to display updates on leasable square feet, property count, etc. Finally, they wanted to be able to quickly show/hide all dynamic content on their website. I added some simple toggling as well as drag/drop sorting to any and all data in the CMS.

The Bellevue is a building located in downtown Philadelphia that houses restaurants, shops, and a hotel. They hired my company, Red 5 Interactive to build an informational site for them. I built a small, custom content management system for this site allowing Bellevue to manage events and photo galleries. The photo galleries could be organized and sorted via drag and drop.