The project was to take an existing program done on WordPress and do it right with Rails. For payment we used PayPal and to serve the video we used Brightcove, so integrating with these services was required. Two apps were developed - one as the actual platform for the training to take place and another just for dealing with the PayPal notifications.

urls: subs.cosmeticsandtoiletries.com, subs.gcimagazine.com, subs.perfumerflavorist.com, subs.skininc.com

These forms take magazine subscription orders and using a SOAP-based API provided by Allured's Fulfillment house, are inserted directly into the subscription file. One important goal of this app was to make Circulation as independent as possible; free to make copy changes and make different offers at different price points without having to rely on a programmer's help.

Also notable: this project is deployed twice to Heroku, once as production and again as a staging environment.

url: learn.cosmeticsandtoiletries.com
launched: October 2010
tech: Ruby 1.9.2, Dropbox API
host: MacMini in the office
client: Allured Business Media

In order to stop printing physical media kits, we decided to digitize the content and this tool kept the live website in sync with a local version for when a salesrep might not have internet access. Using a Ruby script and cron to update a shared Dropbox folder, all reps were kept in sync with any changes Marketing would make to the content of the site. So, it's essentially a brochure-type website being scanned for updates and then when detected these updates make their way via Dropbox to a local copy of the site that can be run without internet access.

Designed to accept file uploads from our advertisers, the main purpose of this app was to get away from having advertisers use our FTP site. We wanted something more friendly, especially for hesitant web users, which most advertisers are. As usually happens with internal tools like this, it never gets any love, thus it's still on a very old version of Rails.

My first Rails deploy, this is always my go-to app when I'm ready to try upgrading to a new version of Rails in production. It's a simple app that allows readers to purchase Journal articles and has some information for would-be contributors or those interested in subscriptions.

urls: cosmeticsandtoiletries.com, gcimagazine.com, perfumerflavorist.com, skininc.com

These four sites were completely re-imagined from the ground up. A Usability/Information Architecture expert was brought in to conduct usability tests and help form a content strategy that lead to wireframes. I then implemented these wireframes producing template code that could run all four magazine sites in one code base.