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.

This is a microsite that I built as a marketing tool for malls owned by PREIT. It allowed people to customize and send flash-based cards to friends and family. It was also built so that a campaign could be coupled with a contest. For example, all cards sent to moms on mothers day could be eligible for a mall gift card. For delivering the cards, I wrote a small script using the WhatCounts.com API. This little application was a lot of fun to work on and a huge success for the associated malls.

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.

TMC, a local trucking company with some of the most beautiful trucks that I've ever seen, hired us to rebuild their website and enhance their web presence. I was in charge of modeling and building a system to manage employees, sales reps, and news. The sales rep data was fed to flash maps via XML. The careers page was built by consuming a remote XML feed.

Signs Plus is a Des Moines area company who is responsible for some of Iowa's most impressive signage. They hired my company, Red 5 Interactive, to completely rebuild and rebrand their site. They wanted something that was loud, colorful, and gets their products right in front of the customer. Our designer took care of the visual aspects, while I was in charge of modeling and content management. The major function of the admin panel was to allow Signs Plus to upload photos of their work. The images were dynamically resized in several ways to fit the flash-based home page, as the rest of the site. Being that the homepage was flash, I also built some dynamic XML endpoints to feed data to power the animations. Shortly after release, we received emails from Signs Plus saying that they were already getting new business based on the quality of their site.

The company I work for, Red 5 Interactive was hired to build a site for NASCAR truck driver, Justin Marks. Our basic guideline from the driver was to "make it like Bam Margera's site." He really enjoyed moving elements, photos, and of course - a music player. My job was to integrate the site with Justin Marks' Flickr account, build XML feeds to power our flash app, and also build a non-flash version of the site.

Soft Focus Art was a local Hip Hop and DJ group who came to my partnership with a limited budget and hopes of a fairly complex, dynamic website. They wanted to be able to update their viewers with bios, media, news, and information about upcoming shows; but they also wanted to keep the design simple with crisp lines and have everything animated via Flash. We helped them out and provided a simple animated design with a PHP/MySQL content management system that delivered XML to the Flash module to display the dynamic content.