launch

This is WAY over due, but I've been meaning to mention a new site that I helped put together and launch for the Portland Web Innovators.

This has been one of my favorite professional development and networking groups since I first attended an event over a year ago.  I had a hard time finding a group of people who are entrepreneurial, technical, independent, and creative.  Many other groups also have a narrow focus, which is also critical to have, but being more of a generalist myself, I find this one appealing.  Great job to Adam Duvander and Ryan Williams for starting it up.

 The site was a very natural fit for Drupal, since one of the primary goals is to connect a community of users. We took advantage of an excellent theme called Deco.  The site is in its infancy with many features to come, but please sign up and get involved in the mean time.

About a year ago, my wife Marti and I and our friends Pam and Rob were having dinner and a beer at a brew pub on Hawthorne. Pam works for the Portland Office of Sustainable Development and told about how she receives frequent calls about people looking for green buildings. This inspired her idea of developing a website containing a directory of green buildings. Marti and I were really excited about the idea, and the GreenRenter team was formed!

The 4 of us worked in fits and starts over the past year or so to get the site launched. Pam and Marti knew a lot about green buildings, Marti from her work at PECI, and Rob and I covered the technical end of things. The site is based on the excellent Drupal platform. It is very basic at this point, containing listings of commercial and residential buildings featuring an in-depth break down of each building, focusing on the green aspects. We have big plans for the site moving forward, and would welcome any feedback with open arms. Marti and Pam contacted many local building owners and managers and have seeded the site with about 40 buildings, although this barely scratches the surface just in Portland. If you know of, own, or manage a green building, please create an account and list your building. Our initial release is focusing on Portland, but we will quickly expand the system to cover more areas.

Stoll Berne is a leading regional law firm,

Deeply rooted in the great Northwest and nationally recognized for outstanding work for more than 30 years, Stoll Berne has achieved extraordinary results for our clients through practical, strategic and tenacious representation.

Level OS partnered with Stoll Berne to develop an attractive and practical dynamic website. Some of the project goals were to convey the firms new image and intuitively present complex and related information such as cases, attorney bios, areas of practice and articles. We turned to Drupal for the job. It's amazing ability to relate different types of content using views with dynamic arguments sealed the deal. For example, if you look at an attorney bio page such as Steve Larson's, it automatically lists all of that attorney's areas of practice. And the article link will show a filtered of list of articles where Steve made a contribution. Additionally, combining Drupal's core capabilities with some contributed modules makes for a top tier content management system, allowing Stoll Berne administrators to control every aspect of the site, from the menu structure to creating pages and other types of content, easily through the web based administration tools.

Alex and Shannon Pasco of PaperRadish were my design partners for this project, and they did an amazing job. Above is a screen shot of the site home page.  David Galyardt of Jetboy Studios did an amazing job developing the theme for the website.  Thanks to everyone involved in the project!