derek.broox.com
- AJAX
- API Design
- BrightKite API
- CSS
- Docker
- Facebook API
- Flickr API
- Foursquare API
- Google Maps API
- Graphic Design
- HTML
- Image Processing
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- JSON
- Mapbox API
- MySQL
- Nuxt.js
- PHP
- Prototype
- script.aculo.us
- Twitter API
- Video Production
- Vue.js
- XML
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
v6 September 2009
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.