Portland

The Journey Gym is a exciting and innovative entry in the portable workout field just launched by Portland based startup Journey Fitness, LLC. It's been great working with their team launching the new site promoting and selling the gym. The site features:

• Shopping cart powered by Ubercart.
• Nutrition blog
• Custom theme development, done in part by Eternalistic Designs.
• Javascript rotating image galleries
• Intro video displayed via a lightbox, streamed from the site using Filefield.
• An FAQ section powered by the module of the same name.

Stay tuned for an online community and a system to put together your own workouts from a collection of exercise clips.

The Portland Parks Foundation

... engages the community in support of Portland's parks, recognizing that government agencies alone are not able to guarantee us the vibrant network of parks and park programs that are our rich heritage.

They are an amazing group of dedicated people who are working hard to ensure Portland's parks continue to serve as living rooms for our communities, playgrounds, sports fields, gardens, and lungs for our city. It's my pleasure to do a small part in helping them achieve their mission with this new website. It features another stellar design by Annette Brooks, and Views and CCK are put to use in showcasing the foundation's projects. Sprinkle in some custom image rotators and galleries, and you have a great new website.

A couple of great guys, Erik Olson and Dan Powell, recently moved to Portland from the icy confines of Madison, WI to start a new cycling accessories company, Portland Design Works. I was luckily enough to connect with them and we worked together to launch their new website, ridepdw.com. In their own words,

We both long ago found a home in the cycling industry. After years of fixing flats at the shop, gritting it out at races, braving icy commutes and eating instant noodles, we have come to a conclusion: this is all we’ve ever done and all we want to do.

So we moved to Portland and started designing products that we as urban riders would want to use. We chose Portland as a home for the company because we figured you’d start a surf company near great waves or a wind farm on a vast plain. Likewise, we started our bicycle accessory company in Portland because the bike-friendly culture allows tons of folks to get around easily by bike. It’s in that great urban cycling atmosphere that we design and test our products. Portland Design Works echoes the urban cycling culture we find inspiring. Anyway, we think the stuff we came up with is really cool. Hope you think so too.

Their first batch of products are on proud display, although they won't actually be available until February, when they can be purchased direct through the website. The site design, based on PDW's identity, was beautifully conceived by Jack Edwin, and Jeremy Caldwell of Eternalistic developed the Drupal theme. Speaking of, the site is built on top of Drupal 6 leveraging Ubercart for shopping cart features. PDW is another great addition to Portland's rapidly growing cycling industry and I'm sure they'll succeed based on the look of the product's I've seen so far.

I have had the great pleasure of working with the team at One Economy Corporation since last December on their exciting new venture, PIC.tv, the Public Internet Channel, a network with a public purpose. always on. What exactly does this mean? A snippet follows below, but you can visit the site to learn more.

The Public Internet Channel (PIC.tv) is a next-generation, public-purpose online network. It inspires, informs, and entertains, helping people live better lives.

The Public Internet Channel combines compelling programming with a launching point into relevant information that provides the opportunity for people to take action.

Everything on the Public Internet Channel is relevant, current, accessible and, whenever possible, local — and always with a clearly-defined public purpose. The Public Internet Channel shows real people in real situations tackling everyday topics, from health to money to living a sustainable lifestyle.

It also provides users with an interactive “Make It Easy” toolbox that gives people instant access to local information and the tools they need to take action based on what they learned. By providing this tool directly to all Americans, we hope to narrow the “information gap” that divides communities and provide a common space that crosses racial, gender, age, religious, geographic and political barriers.

The site features original and licensed video content, which is streamed from the Brightcove platform. The site itself is based on the excellent open source Drupal content management system and web application framework, with significant customizations, mostly at the theme level. Special thanks to Greg Spies of The Interactive Department for his work in helping to develop the Flash rotators in use througout the site.

I have been honored to be involved with this project and it is a rare opportunity indeed to get a chance to combine one's professional skills with broader goals. That, combined with the smart and passionate people I have had the opportunity to work with, has made this one of my most rewarding projects. As Dan Fellini, the project's producer put it,

Savor it, believe in it, and let it energize you forward. There’s work to be done, for sure. There always will be. But it’s important work and we’re up for the challenge.

The site is still in beta and currently requires registration, but I encourage you to spend a moment looking around and provide your feedback.

Just winding down from a great day at the first ever Portland Drupal Camp. This was an unconference in the barcamp tradition, put on the Portland Drupal Users Group. The group that put the show together did a really fantastic job. It was a free to the public, all volunteer event, and was organized better than many paid events I have been to. Hats off to Grant and all the other volunteers who clearly spent a lot of time putting together a great event.

Speakers include many local Drupal wizzes, including Matt Westgate, president of Lullabot and co-author of Pro Drupal Development.

I was a co-panelist with Dan Mendell about at a talk titled Drupal in business, pitfalls, concerns, features for the business owner. Dan is the President and CEO of NeutralSpace, a new company whose focus is experimenting with and deploying collaborative technologies. He have a great presentation about his experiences with Drupal as a business owner, in many ways concluding that while is a good platform with many features available out of the box, successful projects still require a great deal of planning and talent to get them done. I then spoke about running a consulting business based on Drupal and, I think more interestingly, the pros and cons of using Drupal as platform for a web startup.

Working on launching MomHub, GreeRenter, and Newsvetter (for a client) has taught me a few lessons about the latter, although none of those sites have scaled to the point where a platform decision might really start to hurt. The basic takeaway in my opinion is that Drupal is a great tool for getting the common tasks done in an elegant and flexible manner. These include things like a user account system and managing content postings. Having these tasks taken care of lets project teams focus on adding value at the top of pyramid so to speak, not on the basics that any site needs to have. On the other hand, a truly unique idea (at the time) like Twitter probably lends itself better to custom development.