Patrick J Waters

Chicago Public Radio 

I worked as the Lead developer from Febuary or 2010 until March of 2011. In July of 2010 the decision was made to convert the current custom ASP.NET cms into a Drupal 6. The task was given to me to architect and migrate the new site to Drupal. The site and server was developed to handle hight traffic. Six months after the site launch we tripled our traffic. I was able to get one server to handle 1.7 millions page views/month. 

Inside and Out

I was contacted by Chicago Public Radio for this project. Inside and Out is built using Drupal content management system. I used the ZEN Theme Starter Kit, as base theme and built on top of it. I created many custom pages, nodes, and block templates which created an very nice look, that allowed the client to make many customizable changes as they see fit. I utilized many different modules from the Drupal open source community, which allowed for a much faster turn around time, and far more customizable end product. I made use of JW Player to for all audio and video on the sitet. Also used jQuery UI effects library to add some stylish fade In, fade Out effects.

This American Life 

I was contracted by Chicago Public Radio to rebuild the famous This American Life website in Drupal 6. I had to write custom scrapping scripts to migrate the content from the old site because I could not get access to the database. Implemented site from photoshop design. Setup server to handle 5 million page views/month. 

After The Wars 

Another site that I built while working for Chicago Public Radio. This site was for a small project about different war veterans from different wars.

Vocalo.org (WBEZ Blog site)

I was brought in on this site to handle some modifications that the previous developer was having trouble with. I fixed many bad CSS and HTML techniques that were causing browser capitablity issues and also screen resizing problems. I added a custom PHP script that changes the header images based on the Wordpress category that was being viewed.  Cleaned up additional unconventional Wordpress programming techniques that were causing issues. UPDATE...this site now live at www.wbez.org/blogs.

Chicago International Film Festival

I worked with EdigitalStudios and One Design Company on the 2008 Chicago International Film Festival website. The client provided us with a PDF pamphlet,  with over a 50 pages of content, outlining the events for the 2008 festival. I was in charge of converting section of the PDF into HTML format. I used open source Linux scripts that broke apart the images from the PDF, which allowed for a quicker turn around time and less hours billed to the client.

Vicki's Bridal

I built vickisbridal.com from a design provided to me in Adobe Illustrator format. I wrote a custom JavaScript slide show script that allows for an infinite amount of images to be added and also allows you to set transition effect, and transition timmimg. The site utilized HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.