Re-design the look and feel of Wetsuit Gear and use that design as a springboard for Kite Gear.  Have both sites use a single administrative back-end to streamline order processing.

Solution

Wetsuit Gear is an online store that sells wetsuits and drysuits for all sorts of needs.  The site was a few years old from when I originally put it together with OSCommerce.  The client wanted to create a new store for selling kite boarding gear in addition to a refresh on wetsuitgear.com.  Instead of creating two separate instances of OSCommerce we  opted for Magento.  Magento has a fantastic amount of features out the box compared to other ecommerce platforms and it can be setup to run multiple sites from a single admin.  The client logs in at a single point and can manage orders, add products, view reports… all from one place.

Re-design the look and feel of Leigh Ann Barnes’ website.  Have an online catalog for purchasing handbags and accessories.

Solution

Leigh Ann Barnes, LLC sells their own line of reversible handbags.  The Shopp plugin was great fit for this small business.  They are able to manage all their products, promotions, orders and website content.  The homepage slider made for a great way to showcase all the combinations you can have with each bag.

Figuring that someone has to have already made a script that does this, I did some searching and found some code on blog.a2b.cc.   The idea here is that you setup the script with a cron job on some inexpensive and fairly reliable shared hosting account.  This way you have a third party monitoring your precious servers.

In the following I have taken what was posted on blog.a2b.cc and made some improvements.

• Configuration section for clarity
• Option to execute a ping command or use fsockopen()
• Option to use mail() or smtp (via phpmailer)

Not many shared hosts let you use the exec() function.  So executing a ping command is often out.  Using fsockopen() to create a socket connection is a decent way around this.

Using mail() to send your notification emails these days seems to be worthless.  More hosts are implementing throttling and other means that either block or delay sending.  SMTP is really the better way to send.

Installation

First you need to create a table in a database that is something like this:

CREATE TABLE mon_host_ping (
mon_host_ping_id int(5) NOT NULL auto_increment,
mon_host_ping_hostname varchar(128) NOT NULL default ‘’,
mon_host_ping_factor bigint(16) default NULL,
mon_host_ping_lastupdt timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (mon_host_ping_id),
UNIQUE KEY mon_host_ping_hostname (mon_host_ping_hostname)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

Insert the address of whatever website(s) or server(s) you plan to monitor:

insert into mon_host_ping values(NULL, “target.example.com”, 0, NOW());

You will need go through the configuration options at the top of the file.  Upload php-status-monitor.php to your account (preferably not somewhere that is open to the web).  Then create a cron job that will run every minute.  It would look something like this:

php -q /your-absolute-path-or-document-root/php-status-monitor.php -h target.example.com -l pinger.example.com -e myaddress@example.com,8005551212@vtext.com

-h is the “host” you are pinging, -l is the name of the “localhost”, i.e. the machine you are pinging from, and -e is the email address (or multiple email addresses) you want to send any alarm mails to.  If you want it the message sent as a text message to your cell phone you will need to figure out what your cell phone email address is.

Download

php-status-monitor.zip 3.33KB

Feel free to share and edit the script.  Any comments or suggestions submit below.

Re-design the look and feel of G&G Cigar Company’s website.  Have an online catalog were visitors can shop for cigars.  Connect more people with the many events that G&G host.

Solution

G&G Cigar Company is a family owned cigar and tobacco shop in West Chester, PA.  Content management for is handled through Wordpress.  The online cigar catalog features an ajax shopping cart and a streamlined product listing;  The Shopp plugin was used for this.  The news and events part is your standard list-o-posts along with a constant contact signup.  The wonderful photography was done by Adrian Gibbs.

Create a compelling template for blog.

Solution

Was asked to create a Wordpress template for a new blog that Delphic Sage was launching.  The subway is a very prominent feature of the city and it also a series of tubes like the Internet!

Re-design existing website’s look and feel and add better usability and functionality.

Solution

TriangleSings! is a user submitted resource for choral activities in North Carolina.  Although anyone can submit upcoming events or calls for auditions, there are more than 50 power users that login to the administrative back-end and create postings.

With this project I re-designed the existing website and imported migrated the existing data.  I added new functionality such as emailed event reminders and RSS feeds. The forms, calendars, and homepage layouts were revamped for better usability.  The multi-user administrative back-end was cleaned up to streamline both the creation process and submission approval process. Site visibility was greatly improved through the use of friendly urls and semantic markup.

The website uses wordpress with a custom design template.