Nathan Haskins

new blog entry

Visit the document here: Professor Bose list of publications and more.

For this particular task, I had to take a document that was exported from Microsoft word in html format and clean it up. The original document had escape characters, breaks, and all sorts of aliments.

The document contained scientific references for a professor, so keeping proper form, highlighting, and italics was critical. The original document was just around 2000 lines. The final product is much cleaner, properly formatted and 1200 lines. See the images below for a quick overview.

Visit the website here: Continental Equipment Company.

Work done for Studio2108.

CEC needed an inventory management system that would allow them to display their machines on the website.  It also had to be something they could log into, and manage themselves.  My role was to build a CMS that would allow CEC to handle all the text and image inventory changes in house.

For this project, I built the inventory system in Flex, and used PHP scripts to handle the talk between  mySQL database and Apache server.  Two more Flex spots were developed and embedded into the website’s  ‘New‘ and ‘Used‘ inventory pages.  The Flex inventory spots use PHP scripts to grab the data for their content.

The aesthetics of this project are more unrefined then I would have liked to leave them, however budget limitations prevented further work.

Visit the website here: BigRead Project 2009.

Washington University in St Louis is host to the Big Read project, an initiative to promote reading which country wide.  I worked with the university in developing this year’s Big Read website.  The project was build in such as way that updating would be quick and easy, as news and events would come in quickly.  It also had to be built in such a way that non-web programmers could get in and make quick updates.  We took advantage of some of Google’s services to provide the kind of functionality we were looking for and mixed it with some flash and PHP.

Visit the project here: (email me for a link)
Work done for Studio2108.
My role here was to take Photoshop comps, and turn them into flash spot.  The front page spot features various products with taglines that fade in over time, and then fade out to reveal the next spot.  The flash spot on the merchandise page displays slides at the user’s request, and the slide in from the left/right on a clicks.

Visit the project here: Bike St. Louis Map.

Work done for Studio2108.

huge map, tiny screen.

The idea here was to take the St. Louis bike map, and create a version of it that people could navigate from the website.  The problem was the original map is huge.  I took the images of the map and reconstructed it in Photoshop.  After that, the huge files were placed inside of Flash.  The map key elements were removed, then a remote control was added to allow for zooming and other functional. The map key was added later as a sliding menu.

There was a bit of functionality that didn’t make it to the site, due to time restrictions.  The remote was also able to ‘highlight’ bike routes by drawing a solid colored line over a particular section of the map (think google map directions).

Visit the project here: Smellything Candle Comapany.
Work done for Studio2108.

Screenshot of Smellythings.biz

Smellythings Candle company sells custom made-to-order candles or various sizes.  My role here was to take the designer’s vision and apply it to a Zen Cart framework.  A lot of the site has been tweaked, from the custom template to some of the core php to meet the client’s expectations.

Visit the project here: Studio 2108.

Did some basic photoshop work to size the images and make them look right as small representations of the originals.  Then the spot was place into the layout.  The carousel is easy to update using a single .xml file.   When the carousel is clicked, the images slide!  I think the same spot with different images was reused in a few locations on the site.

Image of the carousel

Visit the project here: Karla Smith Foundation.
Work done for Studio2108.

My role was to handle the programming elements on this project.  The work consisted of programming the javascript menus, the ‘headlines‘ tab on the right of the home page, and the flash elements on the front page, the about page, and the video page.  The menus system was extracted from the original HTML and rewritten to be deliver to the browser in php for easy updating.