After his wife had cancer, he decided to spend more time with his family. (She’s okay now, and cancer-free.) He wanted his website to generate income with public speaking and stock photos, instead of having to spend so much time shooting in the field.

Before the Redesign

Joel’s old site was clean and simple, but was tough to update and didn’t offer enough flexibility.

The New Site

The new site is cleaner, more modern, and highlights Joel’s speaking engagements and stock photos as well as his magazine photography. The site’s visual design was executed by the talented Andrew Cohen, and I built the site on top of WordPress.

22,000 Stock Photos, and Hidden Watermarks

Joel needed to integrate 22,000 stock photos of beautiful places and rare species into the site, and he already had a custom-built stock database in place. The system was working fine, so we integrated it into WordPress’s front-end, while making some refinements along the way.

Joel’s images were stored on the filesystem in a way that was fine for the original system but tougher for search engines. They were nested in folders that didn’t correspond to Joel’s stock image IDs, and the watermarks were a little on the ugly side.

To fix this, I built a caching system using a customized version of good ol’ PhpThumb. It pulls the high-resolution image, resizes it on the fly if needed, adds a beautiful watermark, embeds IPTC identification and keyword data, and caches the result on the filesystem.

We hid the watermark with CSS. Try it: the photo of terrifying bats on this page looks great, right? Drag the image to your desktop, or open it in a new window. Voila! You’ll see a helpful watermark that identifies the image ID and strengthens Joel’s copyright of the image.

The site’s brand new, so it’s early to tell how successful it will be at generating new sales for Joel, but the early returns are positive. Search engine traffic has doubled since launch, and thanks in part to aggressive marketing by Joel’s excellent assistant Katie Joseph, print and book sales have had their best month yet.

Before: Drab and Boring

After: Exciting and Useful!

Before: Awesome

After: Way Awesomer!

A fun project built as part of Seb Lee-Delisle’s two-day Creative JavaScript workshops. He taught about particle systems and I applied them to unicorns. Thanks also to Carolyn Sewell and the badasses at Cornify for inspiration.

Posts are rated in a variety of different ways, both by the editors and by the public.

For the nerds: I built the site entirely in WordPress, using the MyReview plugin as the backbone for the rating system and the Templatic theme as the backbone for the front-end. Both of them needed a lot of customization to come up with the resulting site. Both the Templatic theme and the MyReview plugin are solid foundations, but to my mind, they’re not finished products. There were a bugs in both that needed a lot of ironing out, and Justin wanted some customizations beyond what they could handle. The folks at MyReview were very responsive to questions and bug fixes; the folks at Templatic seemed much less so, and there are lots of reports on the forum boards (hidden, until you pay for a theme) with folks asking for help and getting none.

Even more than that, Justin and project manager John Johnson were a huge pleasure to work with, and the project is helping parents all over the pacific northwest.

Photographer John Johnson took a photo of each visitor. The system used Face.com to compare against a set of about 50 prominent republicans. A few seconds later, the lookalike appeared.

The system used an algorithm at Face.com to compare each face. My script grabbed the visitor’s photo, sent it to face.com for analysis, and displayed the results on a monitor a few seconds later. It was a public exhibition, but really just a web page, running full-screen, using MySQL to store the data.

The face.com API returns information about the location of the face in the photo, possible matches against the predetermined dataset, the predicted gender (and confidence level), the predicted amount of smiling or frowning, and whether the person is wearing glasses.

There are other systems for facial recognition and comparison (like Matlab and OpenCV for developers, or Picasa or iPhoto for consumers), but the face.com one made it easy for a PHP coder like me to put this together.

Sometimes it did pretty well:

Sometimes it paid more attention to facial structure than gender:

Sometimes the results were spot-on:

How does it do with drag queens?

Since we had an analysis of a couple hundred visitors, another monitor displayed groupings of those photos, screensaver-style.

Here are the day’s most prominent smilers, as measured by the system:

And the day’s biggest frowners:

The most masculine visitors:

And the most feminine (notice the little boy, top right):

See the project here.