This website was needed to highlight the work of some crazy founding fathers that weren’t getting enough attention. It presented some unique challenges as I had to figure out how to make a partridge with a repeating background in a relatively seamless way. It ended up coming together quite nicely and its one of my favorites sites aesthetically.

The site was originally created for an action to take place on Tax Day 2010. My clients were going up against a powerful media circus sponsored by Fox News which soon became the tea party movement. Our message was to highlight the facts and change the narrative of that day. We were largely successful and got much national media exposure across the spectrum.

The campaign took off from that point and the website morphed through several iterations as new requirements came up and needs changed. I have been with it with full responsibility over the website every step of the way.

Foreign Policy In Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, was in need of a campaign site for coalition work on trying to close the U.S. military bases in Okinawa Japan. They approached me and I was happy to help out.

I found a Thematic child theme to their pleasing and heavily modified it–changing its colors to Twitter-blue and changing how portions of the front page display. One cool feature is the horizontal sub menus that appear when you hover over the main menu items and then disappear after 10 seconds. The advantage of this approach is that the menus never cover the content when selected.

With the site core being WordPress, many of the same features in my Billionaires for Wealthcare site were easily integrated into this site including Twitter Blender, Disqus, and the Wibiya toolbar.

NEWGroup is an organization that formed soon after the economic collapse in the fall of 2008. It was created with the expressed purpose of re-framing the economic policy debate and to address the social and environmental imperatives that seem to be often ignored in typical economic policy discourse.

When the need arose to create a website for the group, I was selected by the NEWGroup core committee to collaborate with a colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies and write up a detailed outline for the future website (an RFP). Once that was finished, it soon became clear they wanted me to construct a customized theme and build out the website.

I used Drupal 6 as the website core along with several contributed modules such as Views, CCK, ImageCache, Boost, and many others. The front page posed the most difficult challenge as I experimented with different modules to fit its unique needs. I eventually decided to do a custom implementation with jQuery.

The site was launched mid January 2010.

I have been a long time member and leader of the Student Trade Justice Campaign since university. Over the course of 2009, we began dialog on holding a joint convergence with an allied organization called United Students for Fair Trade. This is when the idea for Trade Action Camp was born.

We needed a website for this student conference and I was tasked with creating one. I didn’t want just any conference website, however. I had seen a model conference website from DrupalCamp LA that allowed users to not only register, but propose their own workshop sessions, and vote on which sessions they wanted to attend. This model website was open sourced by its creator and it would become the base of our conference website.

The build process wasn’t so easy as I had to take apart, examine, and reconfigure many of the settings to fit our particular use case. The design was also outsourced to someone else. Eventually all the pieces came together and the website was launched and open for registration early January 2010.

Dawn Smith is one of the millions of Americans who have been taken for a ride by their health insurance company. She faithfully paid her premiums to CIGNA for almost six years because she believed they would be there for her when she was in need. When CIGNA denied her care for a brain tumor she joined up with MoveOn.org to get her message out. I was selected to build her a website so her story could reach a wider audience.

I set out finding a great theme and using WordPress for the website core. I used many third-party plugins including NextGEN Gallery, Sociable, Thickbox, Tweet Blender, and others. The website was well prepared with WP Super Cache when MoveOn.org sent out the web link to millions of member inboxes which generated thousands of hits and hundreds of personal comments by concerned individuals.

One of the areas I found most fun in constructing this site was integrating Google Maps into blog posts allowing people to track Dawn’s road trip journey from Atlanta to CIGNA’s headwaters in Philadelphia with geographical context. The site launched in early October 2010.

In the fall of 2009, the country of Colombia decided have a week long PR campaign in Washington, DC. The campaign involved the display of gigantic artistic hearts on public property all across DC. This was a campaign to essentially whitewash human rights crimes in Colombia, particularly against workers who only wish to organize a union, and to pressure the U.S. government into signing the pending “Free Trade” agreement with the country.

I and a group of friends came together to brainstorm what we might do counter the PR blitz and thus the No More Broken Hearts campaign was born. I volunteered to build the website along with a sister website that was satirical, but educational in nature. I built the site purely using HTML, PHP, and css and it eventually launched the weekend before the campaign.

Our counter campaign went beautifully and was picked up by dozens of media outlets including the largest daily in Colombia. I incorporated a listing of all our media hits in the sidebar of the main site and it served as a hugely successful resource hub for the media and all campaigners involved. I think this was a real testament to what a good website can do for a campaign and hope to do many more in the same vein in the future.

In the fall of 2009, I got an email about this strange group of folks organizing a delegation to “thank” the tea-baggers for coming to Washington and rallying on behalf of their profits. That group turned out to be the Billionaires for Wealthcare: “a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, HMO lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system.” I knew immediately this was for me so joined up and had the most fun time I have ever had at a protest.

The Billionaires, while all dressed up and looking great in person, had some issues with their image on the web. They asked me to help out and I became their lead web developer. I made a lot of changes, re-arranging just about every page of the site, and added countless new features including the photo, video, and song sections, along with their press hits area, public forum, and donation page.

I also turned the site into a cutting edge social media powerhouse. I set up the social media campaign pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube and the many widget tie-ins on the site including blog comments, share links, email signup, and the toolbar. I think this site has become a great model for social media integration and the future of issue campaigning.

In the summer of 2009 I was called up to build a website on the Niger Delta. This was to be a website that would allow human rights watchers in the Niger Delta and around the world a place to post up videos, news articles, reports, and general commentary about what is currently happening in the Niger Delta. It would also have a detailed timeline of the history of Niger Delta oil exploitation at the hands of major U.S. oil companies and the corrupt Nigerian government officials they often payed off.

I built the site using Drupal 6 at its core using many third-party modules to extend its functionality including Views, CCK, ImageCache, Boost, and others. I had a lot of fun with this project experimenting with different modules and layout configurations. The website went live late summer of 2009.