Level Online Strategy - Front Page News

Introducing GreenRenter.com

Lev — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:14:00 -0700

About a year ago, my wife Marti and I and our friends Pam and Rob were having dinner and a beer at a brew pub on Hawthorne. Pam works for the Portland Office of Sustainable Development and told about how she receives frequent calls about people looking for green buildings. This inspired her idea of developing a website containing a directory of green buildings. Marti and I were really excited about the idea, and the GreenRenter team was formed!

More information and our new site can be found at GreenRenter.com.

White Bird Dance Meets Drupal

Lev — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:19:01 -0700

It's been my great pleasure to work with the team at White Bird Dance over the last several years on their website. Not only have they been a great client and warm friends, but I have been exposed to the wonderful world of modern dance and am certainly better off, and more cultured, because of it!

When we first started out I was still knee deep in Microsoft based technologies and we developed the initial site using DotNetNuke. This platform served us well for three seasons, during each of which we updated the design to match the given season's unique style and added new features to keep the site fresh such as blogs and discussion forums. But there were also problems and limitations with that site. DotNetNuke did not excel in outputting a search engine friendly website, making updates was difficult and clumsy, there were almost no high quality community contributed modules (and they were not free), and developing custom functionliaty was expensive and complicated.

Drupal to the rescue!

So when we set out to udpate the site for the 2008-09 season, I felt it was time for a change and White Bird agreed. This new site rests on the Drupal platform, making for a more elegant site. Some of the improvements:

Search engine optimized pages and URLs
Lightweight, standards compliant markup
Structured content so that performances can have fields such as videos, images galleries, companies, etc.
A flexible calendar allowing to publish event information in multiple formats, incuding RSS and iCal.
Image galleries and embedded videos.
Threaded discussions about individual performances.
A scalable platform to handle the increased traffic that we're sure is to come.
The ability to leverage the thousands of community contributed Drupal modules.
Build in search engine

In my clearly biased opinion, Drupal, and this new website, are a major improvement which will serve White Bird for years to come and help them a further their mission:

bringing the the best Portland-based, regional, national, and international dance companies to Portland, Oregon and to fostering the growth of dance in the region

Thank to the talented Annette Sabo for her design work and the hard work that Chad Greenwood and Christopher Roesing from White Bird put in to make it happen.

PIC.tv - The Public Internet Channel

Lev — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:13:08 -0700

I have had the great pleasure of working with the team at One Economy Corporation since last December on their exciting new venture, PIC.tv, the Public Internet Channel, a network with a public purpose. always on. What exactly does this mean? A snippet follows below, but you can visit the site to learn more.

The Public Internet Channel (PIC.tv) is a next-generation, public-purpose online network. It inspires, informs, and entertains, helping people live better lives.

The Public Internet Channel combines compelling programming with a launching point into relevant information that provides the opportunity for people to take action.

Everything on the Public Internet Channel is relevant, current, accessible and, whenever possible, local — and always with a clearly-defined public purpose. The Public Internet Channel shows real people in real situations tackling everyday topics, from health to money to living a sustainable lifestyle.

It also provides users with an interactive “Make It Easy” toolbox that gives people instant access to local information and the tools they need to take action based on what they learned. By providing this tool directly to all Americans, we hope to narrow the “information gap” that divides communities and provide a common space that crosses racial, gender, age, religious, geographic and political barriers.

The site features original and licensed video content, which is streamed from the Brightcove platform. The site itself is based on the excellent open source Drupal content management system and web application framework, with significant customizations, mostly at the theme level. Special thanks to Greg Spies of The Interactive Department for his work in helping to develop the Flash rotators in use througout the site.

I have been honored to be involved with this project and it is a rare opportunity indeed to get a chance to combine one's professional skills with broader goals. That, combined with the smart and passionate people I have had the opportunity to work with, has made this one of my most rewarding projects. As Dan Fellini, the project's producer put it,

Savor it, believe in it, and let it energize you forward. There’s work to be done, for sure. There always will be. But it’s important work and we’re up for the challenge.

The site is still in beta and currently requires registration, but I encourage you to spend a moment looking around and provide your feedback.

Google Indexing Flash Sites

Lev — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:24:07 -0700

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl Flash

Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers
can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and
you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Wow, this is big! There goes one of my main arguments against primarily Flash driven sites. I expect as the ability to properly index alternative types of media, that is items other than text and images such as Flash, video, and SilverLight, it will slowly and fundamentally change the way websites are developed, or even thought of for that matter. Why bother a traditional, hierarchical website when you can just invite chaos and allow your users to explore through a semantic search? Think Gmail vs. Hotmail.

Drupal Camp PDX 2008

Lev — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:13:05 -0700

Just winding down from a great day at the first ever Portland Drupal Camp. This was an unconference in the barcamp tradition, put on the Portland Drupal Users Group. The group that put the show together did a really fantastic job. It was a free to the public, all volunteer event, and was organized better than many paid events I have been to. Hats off to Grant and all the other volunteers who clearly spent a lot of time putting together a great event.

Speakers include many local Drupal wizzes, including Matt Westgate, president of Lullabot and co-author of Pro Drupal Development.

I was a co-panelist with Dan Mendell about at a talk titled Drupal in business, pitfalls, concerns, features for the business owner. Dan is the President and CEO of NeutralSpace, a new company whose focus is experimenting with and deploying collaborative technologies. He have a great presentation about his experiences with Drupal as a business owner, in many ways concluding that while is a good platform with many features available out of the box, successful projects still require a great deal of planning and talent to get them done. I then spoke about running a consulting business based on Drupal and, I think more interestingly, the pros and cons of using Drupal as platform for a web startup.

Working on launching MomHub, GreeRenter, and Newsvetter (for a client) has taught me a few lessons about the latter, although none of those sites have scaled to the point where a platform decision might really start to hurt. The basic takeaway in my opinion is that Drupal is a great tool for getting the common tasks done in an elegant and flexible manner. These include things like a user account system and managing content postings. Having these tasks taken care of lets project teams focus on adding value at the top of pyramid so to speak, not on the basics that any site needs to have. On the other hand, a truly unique idea (at the time) like Twitter probably lends itself better to custom development.