S & C Automotive is a company that provides vehicle warranties and protections to local car dealerships. If you buy a car from any of several dealerships in Iowa, you'll be offered a set of warranties - paint protection, rust protection, etc. These protections are all sold to the dealerships by S & C.

I built a web application to allow S & C to manage these protections and offer them to dealerships. The dealerships login and submit each protection they sell. Then, S & C can view, process, ship, and bill for these registrations.

SiteMan is a Content Management System that we've written at Red 5 Interactive. It was originally built so that mall property owners could manage each of their mall property's web sites. However once we realized how powerful our system was, we decided to generalize the app and use it for everyone. That way we would have our own internal product that we could deploying and keep improving for everyone.

We built SiteMan to allow our clients to easily manage a single web site or a group of web sites. This way a parent company could edit any of their child web sites, while employees of the child companies would only see their respective web site.

The front-end of the sites built with SiteMan is also completely extracted from SiteMan itself, which is great for 2 reasons. First of all, it allows us to more easily keep all of our clients' systems up-to-date in that we're just updating SiteMan and not touching their presentation layer. Secondly, it also allows us to launch new campaigns and designs for clients very quickly.

When we deploy SiteMan for a client it comes with a core group of tools like user management, webpage editing, file management, audit logs, etc. From there, custom Tools can be added as plugins. These tools might include functions like, announcements, events, careers, photo management, etc.

We've also built SiteMan in a way that allows users to customize their tool layout. They can pick which tools they use the most and arrange them in a way to get a quick snapshot of the exact data they're interested in. Tools can be added, removed, or sorted at any time - and everything remains just as they left it on their next visit.

This application is very Javascript heavy, making extensive use AJAX, dialog windows, and WYSIWYG editing. As such, we have minimal page loads which provides a very streamlined experience for our clients.

I am very proud and excited to have worked with such a great team on this app. It's so versatile and simple to keep pushing forward. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Edwards Graphics Arts (a partner to NAPA) hired our company to build a web application for distributing posters and flyers to NAPA's retail stores. Each store can purchase any of several different promotional products. This is a process that NAPA and it's 3rd party designers had previously handled over the phone.

I built a web application to help streamline this process and eliminate phone ordering. This app allows Edwards Graphic Arts to import and edit data for the stores to order. Retail store managers can then visit the site and order their promotional products.

This site is very javascript heavy to provide a quicker user experience. I've also integrated it with Pay Flow Pro to allow for online payment.

Adium is a multi-protocol chat client for Mac OS X. I enjoy it because it lets me connect to both AIM and Google Talk.

Shortly after getting Adium I installed the TwitterAdium plugin (or Xtra - as Adium calls it). The problem with this plugin was that I had too many apps hooked to my Twitter account, therefore I was running into rate limitations with the API. I had derek.broox.com, Facebook, MySpace, and Adium all hitting my Twitter account, which made Twitter sad.

Since derek.broox.com grabs and stores my Twitter status, I decided to be nicer to Twitter and write an Adium plugin to grab my status from derek.broox.com. That is exactly what this plugin does.

I built the plugin with Ruby and made it configurable via a YML file. To get my plugin set up, simply update the url and duration in the included YML file. After that, just set your Adium status to %_RemoteStatus. It's as simple as that.

Now, all of my Google Talk and AIM contacts can easily follow what I'm doing while I'm on the go.

The Audit Trail is an internal application that I built for Red 5 interactive. When we build sites for clients, we like to track any administrative actions that take place. This way we can track down any problems - accidentally deleted data, security breaches, etc.

We were duplicating much of this functionality for several clients, so I whipped out this Audit Trail app. I've built it so that we can set it up for our clients in 1 of 2 separate ways. The first, and most commonly used way is for our sites to call the Audit Trail as a service. This way, most of our clients are hitting the same Audit Trail and we can keep a close eye on what all of our clients are doing.

The second way is to install the Audit Trail as a separate app for any given website. We generally only do this if we anticipate a large amount of logs, or if we have a client with several sites that we're hosting.

The app has proven to be very beneficial - our clients really enjoy being able to easily see who's updating what.

derek.broox.com is my blog and general "home page." Its primary purpose is to catalog my life and keep family/friends updated. This site hosts photos, videos, maps, and stories from my entire life.

On top of being a catalog for my life, I also use derek.broox.com as a place to learn and pilot new programming techniques and ideas.

I've recently got the site hooked into Twitter, Flickr, and Google Maps.

Even without major versions, this is a constantly evolving web application.

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