ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

At the end of last week’s TWiT episode, Leo and company talk about the new TWiT.tv site. A clip of that can be listened to below.

Also last week on the Lullabot podcast, Jeff and I talked with Leo about his new site. Have a listen as we talk about the site, how it was conceived and built, and discuss a few of the problems we ran into.

The Yale School of Drama, the second oldest college theatre association in the country, is building a new Drupal website to facilitate online learning for students and teachers alike. The initial scope of the project is for the Special Speech department where they’ll be using Drupal to manage all of their speech audio files used in teaching about regional dialects and accents. From there, they hope to expand and use Drupal to manage the entire Yale School of Drama website.

I just finished the first week for this 8 week contract and it’s going great. I’m the senior web consultant on this project (as usual!) and I am architecting the new site, developing the plans for how all of the various modules and components should be put together. I’m also conducting various Drupal learning activities and mini-talks over the phone on how different aspects of Drupal work and how they are going to be used in the new Yale School of Drama website.

Looking to create an open source iTunes killer, Songbird is an application being developed by the startup company Pioneers of the Inevitable. They are building Songbird on the Firefox browser engine and are hoping their open source media player will start to eat away at the iTunes market share much like Firefox has been doing to Internet Explorer’s share.

For this project, I was the senior web consultant, helping Songbird to update their previous Drupal 4.6 site to 4.7, along with fixing a broken database as a result of crash (it was restored from a binary file…

Webhealth is a startup company aimed at making sense of all the health professionals in America by creating an online directory—a la—a white pages of health professionals. While still in its infancy, Webhealth hopes to make it easy for health professionals to create accounts and then add their bio along with uploading audio and video greetings and speeches they may have given. Users can then use the site to search for health professionals near them, along with posting reviews and comments about various health professionals. They can also bookmark their favorite ones, for easy reference when visiting the website. All in all, Webhealth hopes to bring a healthy does of Web 2.0 ideas and concepts to the health care industry.

What an interesting client! Dabble, a web start-up focused on social-video-sharing, also featured in Newsweek, is following the video trend on the heels of giants like YouTube and PhotoBucket, set out to “organize” all of these videos in a Del.icio.us sort of way. Basically if you find a cool or awesome video, you can tag it and put in your personal collection, to share with others. Very cool indeed! “This is the live Web,” says Mary Hodder, the CEO of Dabble.

My first client after joining Lullabot was Participant Productions, famous for their Syriana and their Good Night, and Good Luck block buster movies. This film company “exists to tell compelling, entertaining stories that also create awareness of the real issues that shape our lives” as they explain on their about page.

A few weeks back, Leo Laporte approached Lullabot about developing the new TWiT website. Well we gladly accepted, I mean, this is Leo! So I was put in charge of developing the new site, and deviating a bit from our usual consultant based contracts, we took the entire development for this project in house so I could really work my magic :-) Well I have to say, this site is coming out amazingly well and just a few days ago we gave Leo a sneak peak.

What we didn’t realize was that he was going to plug us like crazy on episode 47 of TWiT (circa minute 53). His podcast is listened to by at least 250,000 people a week and is consistently in the top 10 podcasts on iTunes. A clip of what he said about us and especially, about my work, can be listened to below. Wow, thanks Leo! I do have to agree with him, this is some of my best work to date, a culmination of 7+ years of web design experience. ;-)