BubbleUp Interactive
BubbleUp Interactive is one of those companies every developer dreams about working for. They specialize in handling website design and development for some of the top entertainers in America today. Their sites are always leading edge with the kind of 'knock you over' artwork and features that clients like Jimmy Buffett, Keith Urban, Gretchen Wilson and other top flight entertainers demand.
I've been fortunate enough to work on a number of projects for BubbleUp Interactive over the years, but one of the most interesting projects involved the development of a series of embedded Flash based media players for a number of their websites. These players all featured full streaming capabilities for content cataloged and hosted on Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as LimeLight or Amazon and were capable of being re-skinned to adapt to the appearance of the website that they were embedded in.
Kast Fabrics
The Kast Fabrics website is a study in the reality of the need to evolve working websites. Working websites have to be up and running every day of the week because both their owners and their clientele depend on them for the services they provide. There simply is no way to know when you first build a website exactly how your business or the demands on the website are going to evolve over a period of time. Often the owner just needs a new feature added to the site to solve some problem in their business. Seldom does this justify re-writting the entire website, but whenever possible, it's a good idea to upgrade the code base that the site is built on as the site evolves. This allows you to introduce better security practices and more easily add new features. Having a code base that is capable of being easily updgraded allows you to keep a website secure and robust for many years.
The Kast Fabrics website was originally written in standard PHP using a few proprietary libraries. This was very common practice when the site first came online. During a recent round of additions to the site, we decided to embed the CodeIgniter PHP framework into the site so that all of our new work could be done in a modern framework without destroying any of the existing work or causing the owner to incure the time and expense of completely refactoring all of the original code to fit inside the new framework. This site now runs as a hybrid site, the original code runs seamlessly alongside the new code in CodeIgniter and eventually, we'll be able to phase out all of the old code and move it into the CodeIgniter framework. This site is hosted and managed by CityScope.Net