Portfolio

Another project from the Population Research Institute. This site showcases their line of funny videos exploding the myth of overpopulation, while also explaining the research behind their conclusions. As with pop.org, the design is theirs; I build their mockups in Drupal and CSS. Also like pop.org, this site began on Joomla, but I moved it to Drupal.

Not long after the move, I saw the power of Drupal modules yet again, when they decided to run a T-shirt design contest. Could I set up a way for visitors to vote on their favorite T-shirt design? A quick search on drupal.org, and I had a good, solid module that would do just that.

When I first started working with the Population Research Institute, their website relied on a proprietary content management system. Their site offered hundreds of articles, but they were full of hard-coded formatting like fonts, heading sizes, and colors (such as purple). Many hours of Perl and proofreading later, PRI had a new Joomla site with a clean, consistent look.

Joomla served them well, but fortunately, by the time they discovered the real constraints, I had discovered Drupal.

St. Mary's Messenger is a new Catholic kids' magazine (ages 7-12), and most of our energy goes into the print version. (I'm also the editor and layout guy.) But we know the web site is our crucial tool for keeping in touch with our readers.

I was very happy to migrate this site from Joomla to Drupal. In past years, with Joomla, I had to write custom PHP scripts whenever we wanted to get custom feedback (e.g., a drop-down list of answers) from potential readers. Today, with Drupal profiles and CCK, it's almost too easy.

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer. (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2007.)

I'm rather proud of this book. Not as proud as the author, I imagine, but with 332 pages, over 1100 footnotes, and a final index of over 20 pages, Sanctifying the World was occasionally strenuous. Good thing I used LaTeX.

The Founding of Christendom is the opening volume of the world history series by Dr. Warren Carroll, founder of Christendom College. This was an easy book cover to make, because Ben Hatke had already made the basic design, and Christendom Press provided me with the image of Constantine. Still, I didn't have the original cover files, so I had to build this cover from scratch.