Friday, March 28, 2008

Wild Bill Guarnere.com:  6 Years online!

It occurred to me yesterday that tomorrow marks 6 years online of my grandfather’s website, Wild Bill Guarnere.com.  The site, as many people know, was in response to the HBO Mini Series, ”Band of Brothers.” Once the series hit HBO, everyone wanted to know the real men behind the story.  So who had the idea for the website, you ask?

Well, that honor goes to my father, Gene, Bill’s son.  He thought it would be a good idea to give the website to my grandfather as a Christmas present.  It was kind of funny, actually, that at some level my father and I both thought my grandfather would be excited by having his own website.  Well, he wasn’t.  In fact, he looked at me and my father, shook his head and said “we’re a bunch of internet-NUTS.” Nonetheless, we launched the site on March 29th, 2002 and it has become one of the largest internet repositories in the world pertaining to information on WW2.  The site, to date has 183643 unique posts by over 4200 members from all over the world.  There are usually several hundred users on the site at any given moment, and we have over the years had visits from the actors, producers and historians who were part of the original HBO mini series.  The site has also become an online community of friends who call each other on birthdays from different countries, send each other Christmas cards, and have provided other members with places to stay when members are traveling.

Wild Bill Guarnere has hosted 3 Community Dinners, all in Philadelphia, and have brought together several members to South Philly from as close as Pennsylvania and as far away as Australia.  My grandfather has done a few “live” chats with guests over the years, which gave the opportunity for his fans to ask him questions via the internet and get his responses.  Wild Bill’s website has made donations to disaster recovery efforts in the Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in 2004 and has made many charitable donations of Wild Bill Guarnere hand signed merchandise and memorabilia.

Wild Bill Guarnere.com has mostly, however, raised awareness about the sacrifices made by our allied forces and has educated the young and old alike.  If you’re a history buff, educator, enthusiast, military personnel or just interested in one of the most significant periods in world history, then Wild Bill Guarnere has probably been a stopover in your internet travels.

Wild Bill Guarnere is 84 years old as of this writing and still is active as a guest speaker for many schools and corporations around the world.  He’s been an inspiration to his family and to the world alike.  I’m proud to celebrate 6 years online!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Expression Engine and Me: B.F.F.

Just to kick things off on my newly designed website, I thought I’d start by extolling the virtues of Expression Engine.  Yeah, I’ve used Wordpress (a great tool, to be sure), and have done a number of Joomla sites for clients as well.  So, having said that, you may be wondering what all the hi-jinks are about when it comes to what seems like yet-another PHP-powered blogging/CMS tool. 

Let me talk a little about how I came to Expression Engine, because the "old" Pixeldust Films site was driven quite nicely by Wordpress. While there was certainly nothing wrong with Wordpress in many respects, I found it just difficult enough to manipulate that I stopped aspiring to make the site better.

Given the fact that my company provides web services as part of our core, well, let's just say that didn't sit very well with me. Wordpress remains highly dependent on plugins, and updating it was a scary affair given all the 3rd party plugins I needed to get my site humming along in the way I wanted. As well, given the very open-source nature of the tool, the plugins were also developed in that same spirit, and it was hard to know what security gaps you were creating in the name of increasing functionality and features.

So I did what everyone else in the business does: started comparing every PHP driven solution on the planet: Movable Type, Wordpress, Joomla, you name it. In fact, I found this insane CMS Matrix that illustrated that there are more CMS solutions out there than fleas on a camel.

After reading about this, that and the other one, I revisited Expression Engine. I developed a site in PMachine a while back, so I was already familiar with the framework, but the new feature set simply destroyed PMachine in all respects. I found myself hungrily reading the features as well as the testimony about their amazing support. My wallet began scratching my back pocket...I was looking to redesign Pixeldust Films anyway and I just found my alibi...

Fast-Forward 2 minutes

I decided it was time to make the jump, and I broke out the Amex and started clacking away on the keyboard. My thoughts on this was that to learn Expression Engine really well means that it becomes yet-another option for my clients and that gives them more choice. As well, I saw some really beautiful sites that were built using EE and wanted to try my hand.

Pixeldust Films has used Wordpress and Joomla almost exclusively as the framework for many of our websites, and I tip my hat to all the contributors of those two platforms. I've relied on their open source frameworks for many a Pixeldust website. Adding Expression Engine to the list of applications I can support is great for Pixeldust's web business.

What I love about this framework

Here's the short list of things I've found to make this one of the most flexible out-of-the-box CMS's on the planet.

• Expression Engine completely separates content from markup and GUI.
• The "many weblogs" approach allows you to display lots of different content from multiple sources very easily.
• The EE tagging system is, for me, very intuitive and highly flexible.
• The templating system is more akin to "real" CMS systems that costs many thousands of dollars.
• The workflow is super easy to manage and they obviously spent a lot of time thinking about it.
• The support community provides real support in a timely and friendly manner.
• Expression Engine has a criteria in place regarding their plugins, which allows for better site security and higher integrity of the codebase.
• Expression Engine is very "situationally aware," and you can really get crazy with the dyanamic content if you want to. With all the conditionals they provide as part of their tagging system, you can really be flexible in the way you display (and when you display) your content.
• Custom fields are intuitive and really allow you to manage your content at the page level instead of the template level. Great for getting non-technical clients to really take ownership of their own website once it has been built.

So, you better believe I'm looking to build more sites using Expression Engine. In fact, if you happen upon this post and need your site redesigned, why not contact me so we can talk about your project!

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

DAM, 2006

This past weekend, I had the great pleasure of participating as a “SME” at this year’s Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York City.  The topic was “Delivering the Brand” and is part of my continued commitment to learning the latest and greatest in cutting-edge tools.  This invitation brought my boss and I (we attended as part of my day job) to a new group of folks who were able to offer their insights and share the common pains of implementing a system as large as DAM.

It was a great pleasure to be there, and I hope to be there again next year.  Thanks to all who made us a part of it…