Pioneering online classifieds site, with presence in 1600 cities.
I took an existing site written in Perl, optimized it, and added new sections using PHP classes. Since there was a virtual host for each city, the Apache configuration needed to be optimized also. New features were added every year, providing world-wide searching and ad posting.
Extensive use of cron-fired reporting and automatic notifications made this site very easy to administer.
Added enhanced features to an online Italian products importer's web store.
Created database backend, content management, inventory management, searching, and various sales, marketing, and presentation tools. Uses outside payment authorization (Cart Manager). Content management and blogging are based on custom framework I created.
The owner has experimented with various innovative features over the years, including a gift registry, gift basket, stories and movies about artisans, recipes, and product selections. Most of their products are from small artisnal vendors, and many are featured in articles to create a bond with the customer.
Large scale and sophisticated consumer information site.
One of the larger and most highly-trafficed Drupal sites, this was built by a team of six developers, working remotely, using online technologies for collaboration. Originally in Drupal 5, it was migrated to 6 and redesigned in 2010.
I learned many lessons about tuning performance, scalability, and content distribution while on this team. The site is served by clusters of web and database servers, mirrored at a second host farm, and deployed with a combintation of scripts and version control systems. All developers were familiar with maintaining different aspects of the site, and had specialties; mine was importating data from partner companies from XML feeds and other APIs and writing custom integration modules.
