Projects

The most interesting project of my career.

0

I just finished what is probably the most interesting project of my career thus far.  This project involved a lot of work with responsive HAML/SCSS, a slew of jQuery, and a hefty serving of Ruby on Rails.  I was brought onto the project a little late, as it was running behind and absolutely needed to launch on time.  I started on it about a month and a half ago.

My role was mostly front-end oriented with HAML/SCSS/jQuery with only a bit of Rails work required of me, but I took the opportunity to get more comfortable with Rails, and took as many back-end tickets as I could (and that I thought I was capable of handling on my own without causing more work for someone else later on).  But I honestly have to say that the most impressive thing about this site is likely the responsive nature of it.  It is completely responsive, and scales based on the screen that is seeing it using media queries.  Apparently this is the first project of it’s kind at Sears, and we were setting a standard for the rest of the company to follow with our work – laying the foundation, if you will.

Stay tuned for images, the link to the live site, and a much more detailed synapsis of the work I did for Kenmore.

The Birthday Club and Facebook’s API

0

KMart's Birthday Club

I recently finished working on KMart’s Birthday Club website, a wordpress-based children’s site that is geared towards parents looking to make their child’s special day memorable.  My role was handling all the social media aspects required in the project plan.

One of the bigger problems I ran into with this – I really didn’t like any of the existing facebook plugins for WordPress, so I ended up building my own.  It was really an interesting learning experience.  This gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into the new facebook Graph API than I have in the past, and it wasn’t as terrible as the facebook API once was.

My largest, and most interesting task, was to pull down photo-galleries and create a taxonomy for each one.  The interaction with facebook for pretty much everything I had to do was fairly simple:

/**
 * Fetches data from facebook API
 *
 * @author Jason Corradino
 *
 * @param $path (required) facebook query path
 * @param $format (optional) format data is returned as either an object or json [obj|json]
 * @param $attr (optional) Adds additional attributes to the URL
 *
 * @return returns object of facebook data by default, json if 'format' parameter is set to json
 *
 */
static function getData($path, $format="obj", $attr="") {
	$pluginOptions = get_option('facebook_gallery_options');
	$token = $pluginOptions["token"] ? $pluginOptions["token"] : FACEBOOK_APP_TOKEN;
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://graph.facebook.com/".$path."?access_token=".$token."&api_key=".FACEBOOK_API_KEY."&".$attr);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$return = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	return ($format == "json") ? $return : json_decode($return);
}

The above code will use your facebook application token to open up a curl with the facebook graph API, pulling down the requested data set within the URL, returning in the format set within the function call — defaulting to an object, but allowing a JSON response.

There will be a more detailed post about this down the line, and I am considering releasing the plugin I built to wordpress.org extend. So look forward to that.

Happy coding

The kmart fashion blog and holiday lookbook

0

My most recent project was for Sears Holdings alongside a coworker and friend of mine, Eddie Moya.  My role was completing the front-end goodness for this—and future—lookbooks, achieving an easy-to-use and polished experience for the user. Was a pretty cool project, and allowed me to toy around with jquery animations—always a fun thing to play with.

The Twitteriffic auto-follower – it’s coming.

0

Do you run a business and harness the power of social media to get your name out there?  Do you watch for mentions, good and bad?  Well, this may help you keep track of those precious mentions, and reward your valuable customers.

My new pet-project (as yet unnamed) will allow you to feed in brand-specific keywords, then watch for people mentioning your keywords on twitter, auto-following those that are talking about you.  This may be a stand-alone script, or a dedicated site.  I will update when I have a bit more information.  Keep a lookout, it is on it’s way.

Go to Top