Coldcreek Design & Landscaping

I worked with another designer on a website for Coldcreek Design & Landscaping. The design goals of the project were to maintain an elegant look around earthy colors, and I believe they were very handily met. Some features include an AJAX-powered contact page and a custom-built image management system.

Facebook's Camp Hackathon at UT Austin

The good folks at Facebook, notably Paul Tarjan, hosted a Hackathon competition at UT Austin a couple weekends ago (Oct 15-16, to be precise). Even though I wasn't allowed to win the Grand Prize since I'm not a UT student, I was still able to team up with a few grad students and hack something together. The project we built was called PicStrmr.

PicStrmr was a real-time service that searched public APIs from TwitPic, Facebook and Flickr based on a term specified by the user. The service would update the page with new pictures as they were uploaded. The overall effect was pretty cool and we won "Best Open Hack."

Thanks to Facebook and Paul for putting the event together!

New Blog (Finally)

I registered troyswanson.net in April of 2005, and I have since used this domain to continually and relentlessly hone my php chi. It's gotten pretty good, but I haven't really been documenting any of my work. Hopefully that will change, now that I finally have set up a blog (and integrated it into my site). I've been doing more and more stuff with Facebook lately - namely created my own custom Facebook and OAuth 2.0 classes - and am pretty excited at the next couple projects I have in mind.

The first project is a custom Facebook skin that will have full functionality through the various API methods that exist. Facebook is awesome but I've never been a huge fan of the UI decisions they have made. I feel it can look a lot cooler and I'm gonna try to do that.

The second project is kind of secret for now, but I'll write more about it when it's appropriate.