This is a design by creative suitcase.  The Hotline web site was already powered by WordPress, but they wanted a new look.  I built them a new theme which worked out pretty well, I think.

Through Austin Free Net, I was able to work on a project with the Texas School for the Deaf. I worked with students and staff on a video dictionary for math-related vocabulary. The students filmed the video and designed the web site. I added a database back end for the video information on the web site, wrote video processing scripts and gave general technology advice.

This site has over 5000 videos on it.  There are about 500 vocabulary words, and each word is signed in both ASL and SEE.  Within each sign type, there is a video with English, Spanish and no captions.  All videos are rendered as Flash Video for the web site as well as Quicktime Video for downloading.

I wrote a Ruby script calling MEncoder to process over 1000 raw videos, add the TSD logo as a watermark, add the appropriate vocabulary word in either English or Spanish and finally output the video as both Flash and Quicktime.  Of course processing that many videos took a long time, but imagine doing that manually in Quicktime Pro or Final Cut?  No thanks.

Check out the site here.

Holly has a local event website. People submit postings about events happening around Austin, and she publishes them to a twice-weekly newsletter that gets sent to 5,000 people.

The site was created using Drupal. There’s no less than 30 modules installed and many code-level customizations. I have become very familiar with Drupal over the course of this project and now have a very good sense of what it does well and what should be avoided.

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