KOZT (The Coast)
KOZT (The Coast FM) is the top radio station in Mendocino County, CA. In addition to their musical activities, The Coast serves as an information hub for area events and concerts in Northern California. They really shine when the power goes out — their contacts with the power company and law enforcement enable them to provide timely updates during bad weather emergencies. One of their primary requirements was to be able to quickly add and remove events highlighted on the home page. To provide background info for the on-air staff, they maintain an extensive database (over 13,000 entries) of music, entertainment, and historical events. They invite people to share their stories about life in Mendocino County, and provide an audio library of stories. They also sell promotional items in their store, mostly logo merchandise along with some locally-produced music CDs.
The Coast also streams their broadcast on the Web, and you can play the current stream while visiting the site. The site is fully responsive, and you can play the audio feed on both desktop and mobile devices. One of the fun things was to show what’s currently playing, along with the recent history. They wanted to make sure this information was continually updated at sub-minute granularity, so it’s a mix of backend PHP (with a cron job) and Javascript on the frontend to handle the display updates, communicating through the WP-Ajax interface. The scheduling software used by the station spits out an XML file whenever the stream changes. Since that software cannot notify WordPress when changed, it’s necessary for backend code in WordPress to watch the file for changes. Once the file has changed, the backend processes the results and saves it as an HTML snippet. Each visiting browser periodically sends its last-updated timestamp to the server, which sends back the updated song info if there’s been an update since that client last checked.
KOZT.com has quite a bit of custom code: it’s a custom theme, and a number of additional modules were built in PHP along with Javascript on the front-end.
Corda Foundation
I’m in the process of building 5 related sites for the Corda Foundation, all focused on different aspects of the work of David Rosenmann-Taub, the Chilean poet, artist, and musician. Since the foundation’s goal is to promulgate the artist’s works, they wanted a very non-commercial and minimalist feel for the sites so that all of the focus is on the content and the artist. All of the sites are fully responsive, allowing viewing on any device. The 5 sites are:
- Poetry of David Rosenmann-Taub: this tri-lingual (ES, EN, FR) site features the poetry, along with scholarly articles and interviews with the poet.
- Music of David Rosenmann-Taub: this tri-lingual (ES, EN, FR) site features the music.
- Drawings of David Rosenmann-Taub: this site features the drawings.
- Corda Foundation: this describes the mission and workings of the Foundation.
- Corda Awards: this tri-lingual site describes the Corda Awards program for the Study of the Artistic Works of David Rosenmann-Taub, including profiles of past award recipients.
A common requirement for these sites is the need to show galleries of things: books, articles, drawings, CDs, etc. When there’s a collection of similar things, I placed the items in subpages under a common parent. When the theme page detects sibling pages, it creates navigational arrows for next/previous pages in the collection, as well as general Up/Down buttons for scrolling long pages.
Corda Foundation
The Corda Foundation is dedicated to the distribution and promotion of the artistic works of the Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub. Since the Foundation is purely non-profit, they wanted a set of related minimalist sites that would not draw attention away from the artistic works.
The Poetry of David Rosenmann-Taub: this site is devoted to his poetry, and it contains sample poems, essays, interviews, videos, and descriptions of his books.
The Music of David Rosenmann-Taub: Rosenmann-Taub is also an accomplished pianist and composer, and the Corda Foundation is in the process of recording and creating CDs of his music.
The Drawings of David Rosenmann-Taub: the artist also draws, mostly pen and ink on paper. His style is very striking, and his drawings are another expression of the artist’s vision.
The Corda Foundation: the Corda Foundation is a nonprofit group founded to preserve and publish the artistic works of David Rosenmann-Taub.
The Corda Foundation Awards: every 18 months, the Corda Foundation hosts an awards competition for scholarly and artistic works based on the artists’s poetry. In addition to academic literary analyses, they offer awards for translations of the artist’s work, as well as a doctoral fellowship for in-depth study.
FortBragg.com
FortBragg.com is the official tourism Web site for the city of Fort Bragg, CA. After using WordPress for years (with hundreds of posts), the committee decided to go with a Drupal-based site, but the developer did not merge the old content into the new system. When I took the contract, I built a new theme on WordPress, and merged all of the content from the Drupal site and the previous WordPress incarnation. I then extracted the beginnings of the Fort Bragg business directory from Drupal, and rebuilt it in WordPress (all done with zero documentation for the Drupal site). I also created a mechanism that allows business owners to securely edit their listings without requiring a WordPress account. This site now been replaced.
Monolith Design
This is my own Web site. It includes a portfolio of my Web and graphic design work, photo galleries, and the Web design class materials that I created when teaching at the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg. Other features include a port of the old Unix cookie program, with an enhanced database of “fortune cookies” collected by me. You can also find recent posts from my Twitter feed.
MendocinoFun.com
This site is a guide to the Mendocino Coast in Northern California with hundreds of pages and blog posts. Although primarily aimed at visitors, it’s also used by locals because of the breadth of information. In addition to extensive writeups about area parks, attractions, and events, you’ll find extensive galleries of high-quality photography and video. The site also uses some of my custom maps of local parks. Since the site was launched in 2007, it’s gone through 4 different iterations of the WordPress theme.
More Sites
Here are some other sites I’ve created.
- C.V. Starr Community & Aquatic Center: this WordPress site describes everything that goes on at this community center, which includes 2 pools, a fitness center, meeting rooms, classes, a dog park, and more.
- Mendocino Rotary Club: this simple WordPress site for the Mendocino Rotary Club has a custom theme and some additional backend work for formatting meeting minutes.
- Atrium B&B: this WordPress site is for the Atrium Bed & Breakfast in Fort Bragg, CA. In addition to describing the inn and its amenities, it has some excellent information for area visitors.
- Blanchard House: this WordPress site shows this one-room B&B in a beautifully-restored house that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. The gardens are lovely, too.
- Wagner Photo Art: this site shows the digital photography and artwork of Larry Wagner, an extraordinary portrait photographer in Mendocino.
Historical Archive
Here are some other sites that are now lost in the sands of the time, including: Mendocino Coast District Hospital (3 WordPress themes over 6 years), Kelley House Museum, the Mendocino Hotel and Hill House Inn, Surf Motel and Gardens, the Surf & Sand Lodge, Jim Davis Tour & Travel, and Branesky Sheet Metal. I even did multiple versions of the Web site for Agate Cove Inn, which I owned for 6.5 years.