Dragonsaber News

Etsy Feed Update

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:04:00 +0000

Previously, Kimengyeo.com was taking a feed for products the artist was selling in her Online Etsy store, SketchyCards. All items used to have the same template and introductory paragraph, so I had ColdFusion strip it out so it wouldn't look repetitive on the page that was parsing the RSS. Just recently, Kim added some new products that no longer followed the template. So the truncation and processing has been removed. Check out new products for sale on SketchyCards by Kim Eng Yeo.

Additionally, the homepage has also been updated with 2012 events.

Wiley Web Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:57:00 +0000

We had another Saturday morning deployment today, though not as early as the usual 6am. Here are some of the highlights:

WIREs: Another new journal went up for WIREs... Developmental biology is concerned with the fundamental question of how a single cell, the fertilized egg, ultimately produces a complex, fully patterned adult organism. Click here to visit WIREs.

AARP Bookstore: In partnership with AARP, we'll be selling a bunch of our books with special branding through this co-branded bookstore. The site components went up with this build, but the URL has not yet been publicized. I'll provide it in a future post once it goes public.

All Sites: All sites in our system will now have links to buy books from Foyles, MPH, Kinokuniya, Sony and WH Smith if they are detected as being available.

WIREs Membrane Transport and Signaling

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:36:00 +0000

An important new forum to promote cross-disciplinary discussion on transport and signaling aspects in membrane biology for researchers in science and medicine

An authoritative, encyclopedic resource addressing key topics from perspectives of biophysics, cell biology, neuroscience, physiology and medicine

Content is fully citable, qualifying for abstracting, indexing, and ISI ranking

Click here to visit this new journal

Windy City adiZero Rose 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:27:00 +0000

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Blogger Modal Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:03:00 +0000

Blogger has updated their templates so that clicking on a photo with their default embed code opens up the larger version in a modal window now. The old method just opened up the image in a new blank page with no interface. Now the experience is streamlined and eliminates the need to use the back button. Click on the photo in the post below to check it out. Page updates without doing any work are the best!

Wiley's Scientific, Technical, and Medical Databases

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:40:00 +0000

The Wiley's Scientific, Technical, and Medical Databases mini-site was updated last week. It was another quick design refresh to modernize the look and make things easier to navigate for the user.

Before

After

Visit Wiley's Scientific, Technical, and Medical Databases

RCT Hours

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:39:00 +0000

Please make note of RCT Perfomance's new hours of operation.

Wiley Web Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:38:00 +0000

CliffsNotes underwent a number of changes with the last deployment. The "college" header item now goes to a 3rd party section. "Cliffs Films" was added as a new section. The Literature section had a bunch of design changes after some user testing. "Chapter Summaries" now has a more prominent button on the first page of each Litnote. The graphic repeating the Litnote title was removed because it wasn't serving any purpose other than bumping the TOC lower down. Rolling over the next and previous buttons now displays the page titles. Click here to visit CliffsNotes.

WIREs had a logo change and a new homepage feature that links deeper into some of the articles. Each journal now has it's own unique header graphic and matching splash image. Click here to visit WIREs.

Leadership Challenge was completely redesigned. Previously, it was still stuck in an outdated 800x600 design. The new site was widened to 1024x768 and given a fresh new color palette. Click here to visit Leadership Challenge.

Sybex

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 01:54:00 +0000

Sybex has always been one of my favorite computer reference brands. I was happy when Wiley acquired them so I could get discounts on the books. Now I'm also happy that I could contribute to the website. For the past few months, the development team in Indianapolis has been working on a redesigned site, updating the previous one which was in a very old style. It wasn't even 1024x768 yet! We used a lot of jQuery to make the navigation rich and compatible across browsers and platforms. It also helped in customizing around the restrictive template we were working with.

The template we were moving Sybex into is a mini-site that actually lives in Wiley.com. Many of the past ones visually look like part of Wiley, but with Sybex, we used a lot of style overrides and inserts to really make it stand alone. The dominant dark colors take the attention away from the green Wiley tab in the upper right. And the techie community will appreciate the nice graphics and visual effects. The new site also does a great job of highlighting all of the titles.

Click here to visit the new Sybex

Dummies Videos on iOS

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:06:00 +0000

A couple of weeks back, Dummies.com added a quiet update. There's now a JavaScript detecting iOS and Android mobile devices whenever a video page is accessed. When detected, it'll switch to an HTML5 video player (rather than the default Flash one). Now users accessing Dummies videos on the iPhone or iPad won't get a blank box or error. This is a very useful update because the iPad is a great tool for how-to instructions, which Dummies.com has a lot of.

Android users probably won't notice a difference because those devices were already able to play the Flash version. It just serves up HTML5 if Flash is not installed.

MoMA 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 20:47:00 +0000

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Museum of Natural History

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 29 May 2011 21:20:00 +0000

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More Launch Announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sun, 29 May 2011 01:35:00 +0000

CliffsNotes
This site was recently redesigned to have a more modern look. CliffsNotes was already the right width, but it needed some color and layout changes to keep up with its competition. Though I worked on some tweaking of this site, my work was primarily on the standalone mobile version. It was the first Wiley to go fully mobile, so it was fun to research and try out what methods worked best.
Click here to visit CliffsNotes

eLS
eLS, or Encyclopedia of Life Sciences was a very similar project to Comprehensive Physiology. It had identical component types, but a different design. This went along very smoothly as I learned a lot from the previous project and also took jQuery and CSS classes just before starting.
Click here to visit eLS

My WileyPLUS
The largest relaunch of all was WileyPLUS. It involved a login system, a customizable account for students & instructors and a homepage server move. There were so many moving parts and different groups involved that we had to kick this one off on a Saturday with some cleanup on Sunday. I worked primarily on frontend JavaScript/jQuery/CSS for My WileyPLUS and the homepage.
Click here to visit WileyPLUS

Highline Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Thu, 26 May 2011 03:17:00 +0000

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This post was titled "Preview" because the photos were shot with an HTC Incredible smartphone. Hopefully this will get reworked with a better camera later this Summer. Stay tuned!

Statue of Liberty on Schmap

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:12:00 +0000

Check out my Statue of Liberty photo on Schmap...

http://newyork.schmap.com/attractions/statue_of_liberty?pn=333

It was picked last year when the site launched. Schmap is a location technology service provider and local publisher, with cutting-edge expertise at the intersection of local, social, commercial and the real-time web.

Donations to Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 02:39:00 +0000

Friday's earthquake and tsunami permanently shifted Japan's coastline by a good 8ft. The country will still experience several aftershocks to come, so it will be a difficult recovery. I went through my list of relief organizations and personally link-checked all of them to make sure they had a way of donating to this specific disaster:

Thank you.

SketchyCards

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:38:00 +0000

Kim Yeo just opened up an Online shop @ Etsy where customers can now buy reproductions of her work on sets of 6 greeting cards. Works range from sketches to complete watercolors.

Etsy stores have built-in RSS feeds, which came in handy for quickly building a low maintenance presence on Kimengyeo.com. ColdFusion was used to parse the RSS and jQuery to style the content data within the feed.

Click here for SketchyCards

Pfeiffer

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:36:00 +0000

Almost immediately after the Comprehensive Physiology launch, the Pfeiffer redesign went up. The old version was falling out of date with it's compact 800x600 design. While the version that launched wasn't a full redesign, it looks like it visually because of the width change and modern color palette.

Work on this site included reskinning an existing site with minimal recoding. The homepage and few main pages were the only ones built completely from scratch. The new pages are clean XHTML/CSS and the rest of the site is legacy code enclosed in XHTML. The navigation involved some light jQuery.

Click here to visit Pfeiffer

CNY Parade in Flushing

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:03:00 +0000

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Glazed Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:43:00 +0000

New York has been covered by snow since Christmas. There were piles varying from 2-5ft from 2 large snowstorms. Earlier this week, the piles were glazed over by an icestorm, leaving a nice transparent layer over the white snow. It looks especially nice on the untouched, natural piles. I took some pictures by the park on the way to work yesterday and then some more today around the house:

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Comprehensive Physiology

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 02:46:00 +0000

Comprehensive Physiology is the first complete website I worked on that launched since my new position. While the front end code isn't anything complex, working on this project really gave me a good overview of the anatomy of most of Wiley's websites. My contribution to this site includes graphics conversion, heavy CSS and light JSP work.

Click here to visit Comprehensive Physiology

Frommer's Manila

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:53:00 +0000

Many years ago, Frommer's had a full Philippines guide. Then it dropped out of popularity and eventually off the website as well. But it made a return to the site with the last 2010 update as they added Manila to Southeast Asia. Philippines has grown a lot since the last time it was on Frommer's, so the lists of hotels, restaurants, attractions, nightlife and shops are completely different.

Click here for Frommer's Manila

WileyPLUS Course Finder

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:40:00 +0000

This was one of the first challenging projects I had in my new job because it involved a lot of dynamic elements on each page and it was a new product. The backend was handled by a team of programmers in our Russian office. I took care of the look and feel as well as the JQuery rollover functionality you see after you search for an educational institution. I originally has everything in straight JavaScript, but redid a lot of it with JQuery that I learned on a different project/site.

Click here to Visit WileyPLUS CourseFinder

Life Underground

noreply@blogger.com (Kerwin) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 02:24:00 +0000

I always wanted to take pictures of Life Underground by Tom Otterness. It's an installation sculpture series created in 2002 for the 14th Street and 8th Avenue station. I finally had a camera with me and just missed the train, so I had a few minutes to capture some of Otterness' playful characters.

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Wiley Mobile Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonsaber Admin) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:38:00 +0000

The Wiley Mobile Apps page was updated with a number of new iPhone applications this week.

Wiley Newsletter Mobile Reader
CompTIA A+ Flashcards from Sybex
Accounting Flashcards and Self-Tests
Contemporary Business
Exploring Management

[Click Here for Details]