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pingVision

California Watch Launches in Drupal

Posted Sun, 2010-01-03 23:19 by matthew

caliwatchThe last project that I worked on at pingVision, prior to becoming a free-agent, launched in the last couple of days. I'm thrilled that California Watch has joined the ranks of the Drupal community. The Center For Investigative Reporting is a fine non-profit that has been doing good work since 1977 engaging in in depth investigations on issues that concern Callifornians.

I had the pleasure of Web Producing the development of the California Watch site and also engaged in some light configuration of various modules including quicksketch's excellent Insert module. I hope I get the chance to write about that module in the near future. Both the teams on the pingVision side and on the California Watch side were a real pleasure to work with and for. It was a fun "swansong" project for me.

My Life Transitions

Posted Fri, 2009-11-20 11:27 by matthew

My life is once again in transition. For those that don't want to read this entire post, I'm shifting my work-life to focus more on freelance. So, with some regrets (but also excitement) I'm leaving pingVision, the Drupal shop based in Boulder Colorado for new adventures. In this new role as projects wrap up I'll write about what I've experienced and learned.

My goal is to leverage my experiences as a technologist and nonprofit professional to continue to affect positive change.

What a great 2.5 years this has been! I started at pingVision in the summer of 2007 with expectations of working on great projects and with fabulous people. I was not disappointed. I've worked, in one fashion or another, on about thirty sites in that time. The highlights include:

  • Spectrum Magazine
  • Popular Science Magazine
  • Bikes Belong
  • Red Blue America
  • two sites for Stanford University
  • Classic Graphics | Opus
  • Earthday.net
  • Paul Taylor Dance
  • Firehouse.com
  • SportingNews

The richness of working on such a diversity of projects ranging from the arts, to universities, to nonprofits, to political, to activism has been wonderful. I want to take a moment to thank Katherine Lawrence and Laura Scott for asking me to join pingVision. I've enjoyed working with an amazing group of Drupal professionals.

Firehouse.com Launches in Drupal!

Posted Thu, 2009-11-19 23:53 by matthew

FirehouseThis past year I was fortunate to have worked on the Firehouse.com - a property of Cygnus Business Media - website as Web Producer for pingVision.

Firehouse represents a community of firefighting volunteers and professionals. This group of men and women enjoy sharing their "digs", equipment, and experiences. The site needed to reflect and appeal to this community.

Cygnus Business Media brought wireframes, a few comps, and excellent requirements documents.

My role on this project was to:

  1. To interpret existing requirement documents and wireframes and give them context within Drupal
  2. Draft use cases that matched the functionality described but could be developed in Drupal
  3. Act as scrum master with the team and the client, a process that worked great for both the external and internal teams
  4. Develop information architecture in conjunction with our themers and designers
  5. Manage Quality Assurance

SportingNews.com - Blogs on Drupal

Posted Mon, 2009-11-16 01:07 by matthew

SportingNewsA year ago I was hard at work with my colleagues at pingVision putting the final touches on an incredibly robust blogging platform for SportingNews.com.

Recently, the work we did, was launched - quietly with no fanfare.

SportingNews was a lot of fun to work on requiring a complete re-architecting of how blogs work within Drupal. Blogs needed to allow for re-branding based on sport but also needed to be flexible enough to allow user generated posts. "Official" blogs needed to allow for more than one author leading to a taxonomy based solution.

The blogs also included some pretty heavy integrations with existing systems.

It seems I'm saying this a lot these days, but CONGRATULATIONS SportingNews team! The blogs look great.

Open Atrium Video

Posted Wed, 2009-09-02 04:03 by matthew

On August 8th, Ian Cairns and Matt Tucker presented on Open Atrium. Video was taken from several angles and cut together by Laura Scott, the President and Creative Director of pingVision. Laura posted the video this morning on blip.tv - I mentioned I'd link to it at the time I posted my comments. Thanks Laura!

Here it is:

pingVision Becomes an Acquia Platinum Partner

Posted Fri, 2008-12-12 22:28 by matthew

Two days ago it was announced that pingVision has become an Acquia Platinum Partner.

I've heard Acquia described thusly as Redhat is to Linux, Acquia is to Drupal. Acquia offers commercially supported Drupal, "providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system."1

pingVision's New Look (in Drupal 6) and a Year in Retrospect

Posted Wed, 2008-07-09 11:08 by matthew

The pingVision site has re-launched with a new look and a brand new version of Drupal. Laura mentioned that there has been almost a year of architecture invested in the site. Almost to the day today, I was hired by pingVision and one of the first things we were doing was working on brainstorming the architecture.

Sun Microsystems Interview

Posted Thu, 2008-03-27 22:30 by matthew

At Drupalcon Boston, Kevin Bridges (of pingVision) and John Mahoney (of Popular Science) were interviewed after plenary was completed and pingVison's work on the Popular Science site was recognized. It was a short discussion on the collaboration between pingVision and Popsci in the Drupal development of the Popular Science site. The interview was posted on the Sun Media Cast site.

Want to take a listen?

Popular Science Wins Top Prize at Drupalcon!

Posted Fri, 2008-03-07 11:31 by matthew

I compared it to winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Yesterday, pingVision won the top Drupalcon Boston award for Drupal Web Development for its work on the Popular Science migration from Vignette 7 to Drupal. Both Megan Miller and John Mahoney are to be congratulated. They worked hard with the pingVision staff to ensure the project went smoothly.

Popsci--the Switch is Flipped

Posted Wed, 2008-01-23 21:19 by matthew

Today, the switch was flipped. Popular Science is now officially launched as a Drupal site. Three weeks ago, I wrote a bit about the process the team went through to develop the site and today it launched with imported content from Vignette 7 (a proprietary CMS) and Typepad. It involved a huge effort on the part of pingVision and the Popular Science team and was a model for collaborations between developers and clients.