Michael Anthony Wright

Web Developer and PHP/PERL [and soon to be ASP.net!] Programmer

Portfolio - Others

Unfortunately, many of the projects that I have worked on in the past cannot be linked in this portfolio.  For some sites, it is because they no longer exist, and for others, it is because they have long been updated and modified beyond the work that I have done on them.  And then there is the work that cannot be seen, either because there is no online presence in the work or because it requires access that I cannot provide.  This page contains a collection of those pages.  Some of them might be found in the Internet Archives website.

Assurant Solutions

I worked on the Traffic Log Pro (TLP) product for Assurant Solutions as a PHP/Web Developer.  TLP is a web based solution for tracking customer/dealer activities in the powersports market.  My duties including creating HTML forms for use by the dealers using HTML/JavaScript and occassionally AJAX.  This forms, when submitted, would store the form data in a MySQL database and then redirect the user, a dealership employee, to a page that was design to be printed in a format similar to worksheets provided by the dealer.

In addition to this, some major projects that I worked on while on the TLP project include:

• Adding new data to reports for mothly sales and return customer figures.
• Updating the interface with Google API for mapping customers.
• Moving the PHP hardcoded configuration file to a PHP/MySQL databased solution.  I also created forms to create and manage the configuration variables for the sites as well as the list of configuration variables globally.
• Updated the user access management system from a CPANEL controlled system to a PHP/Apache htaccess based system.
• Began the work on the localization project that will allow the product to be sold in foreign markets.

The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel (TWC) has several web and desktop products that dump information to log files on the servers.  Hourly scripts then process these logfiles into usable data for the business units to use to improve their product and target their marketing and advertising.

I was brought on board to work with the Analytics team to transition this script from using a Oracle database for storing their data to a MySQL database.  This involved working with the DBA to design and create the tables needed for the processed data and to update the PERL scripts appropreately.  Nightly scripts that takes the hourly data and further processes it had to be completely rewritten, as those tables were completely redesigned to use a star schema solution.

Radius3

Unfortunately, two of my favorite Radius3 developed sites no longer use Radius3 as their hosting provided and developer.  Those sites are Pepper's Catering and Cookshack.

Pepper's Catering was one of the first sites that I worked on with Radius3.  This was a complete HTML/JavaScript/CSS powered affair, with lots of rollovers, hidden divs that would appear with a mouseclick, and lots of nice tricks with images.  At the time, I considered it to be one of my masterpieces.  The site can be found in the Internet Archives, but many of the images and most of the pages missing, from the archives, so the experience cannot quite be duplicated.

Cookshack is the manufacturers of smokers and grilling supplies.  When I first began work on the site sometime in 2005, I was still primarily a front-end developer with Radius3.  As such, I primarily worked on HTML and JavaScript development for the site.  The most complex piece that I initially built for the site was a system were the navigation menus for the site would change wether you seleted to see the site for residential, commercial or competition users.  This choice would then be stored in a cookie on the system so that a user would go straight to the part of the site in which they were interested.

As my position with Radius3 moved to PHP server-side development, so did my work with Cookshack.  For starters, I created a recipe system were site admins could add grilling recipes which user could then search on and print.  Even more complex, however, was the intricate work that was done on Cookshack's UPS API  integration.  Cookshack's shipping methods were complex and it took a considerable amount of work to get a working solution.

As with Pepper's Catering, some parts of the old Cookshack site can be found in the archives, but much of the functionality of the site has been lost.

Perhaps the most unique experience with Radius3, however, was the CMS system which Radius3 sites are built on.  Since the rights to the CMS are owned by Radius3, we did not just reuse third party modules to add new features to a site.  We created new modules for the CMS all the time, often to specific client needs.  And making new features and updates to the CMS were all part of the job.