BonzoBox

Create a social homepage based around bookmarks.

My BonzoBox homepage.
My BonzoBox homepage.
You can store a custom title, description, and tags for every site you save.
You can store a custom title, description, and tags for every site you save.

About a year ago I was contracted to build a homepage that used screenshots of websites to link to the sites, had drag & drop to move the sites around, and was easy to use. Marcos Cantoni of Visual Dreams Interactive did the great design work, and I did the coding. Fast forward a year and BonzoBox has come a long way – it is a social website built around the sharing of websites. I am now a partner in the site, (and the CTO), and we are making it even greater!

BonzoBox brought my AJAX skills to a whole new level. It features drag & drop, ajax forms, tagging, dragging items out of flash movies, inbox widgets, and more, with more in the pipe. I also used a Javascript Library for the first time – I chose DOMAssistant because of its light weight and modular structure, and am extremely happy with it.

BonzoBox is currently in public beta and I encourage you to go Sign Up and try it out.

Re-Design!

Goodbye to the old Summer Fun theme!
Goodbye to the old Summer Fun theme!

After over two years it is time to say goodbye to the old “Summer Fun” theme.

This new theme has been created in my spare time over the past couple of months. It is designed to highlight what I post. The sidebar, footer, and metadata all fade away unless they’re moused over, there is lots of white space, and with the introduction of ClearType I have updated the fonts to be more like a printed book. The new theme also uses no images!

There will, of course, be some tweaks to be made over the next while as I get some feedback, but for now, enjoy!

4RoadService.com

Re-design the 4RoadService.com breakdown directory.

4RoadService.com home page after the re-design.
4RoadService.com home page after the re-design.

New search results on 4RoadService.com
New search results on 4RoadService.com

Quite some time ago I was engaged to update some information in a database and increase the speed when searching the database. This small job bloomed into a lasting business relationship and a full re-design and modernization of the breakdown directory 4RoadService.com.

The redesign brought 4RoadService.com from a legacy-style table-based layout to a modern, semantic, layout using the latest web standards. At the same time I updated the data structure to further improve the site performance, updated the account system and more. To top it off, I added some AJAX scripting to make everything feel snappy.

A year after the launch of the new design 4RoadService.com continues to grow, and even more features are planned for the next weeks and months.