Mark Burgess

Seattle-area Web consultant, specializing in Drupal.

Contact

Drupal.org: markabur
Twitter: http://twitter.com/markabur
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markabur
E-mail: mark at zymosis.com

Projects

Here are some of the websites I’ve built. On all of these I was either the sole or lead developer, but not the designer.

Cucina Fresca

Drupal • jQuery • Drupal makes it easy for chef Bradley to add new recipes and associate them with Cucina Fresca ingredients. Partnership with Lookatlao Studio. Visit site »

Global Diving and Salvage

Drupal • jQuery • OpenLayers • Mapnik • For this client, new projects come up suddenly, and Drupal makes them quick to add. They’re easy to enrich too, with project updates, news articles, videos, and photos. Each project has its own RSS feed and is plotted on a custom-designed map. If the project is current, it appears on the “Where Is Global Today” satellite map. Agency: Phinney/Bischoff Design House (PBDH). Visit site »

The Bravern

Drupal • jQuery • Website for a high-end retail mall in Bellevue. The store directory integrates with the event/promotion calendar and the interactive map. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

The Northwest School

Drupal • Migration from a static HTML site. Custom integration with Trumba calendar service. Slideshows that used to be tedious to prepare and publish are now fast and easy, thanks to server-side image manipulation and a customized zip-upload process. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Cochran

Drupal • jQuery • An easily-updated portfolio keeps the site current. Project and news blocks are context-aware. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Phinney/Bischoff Design House

Drupal • jQuery • Migration from ExpressionEngine, including content types, taxonomies, views, users, and comments. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Seattle University School of Law

Ingeniux CMS • Migration from a complicated proprietary XML-based workflow to an XML/XSLT content management system. Large site with lots of stakeholders. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Margaret Thatcher Foundation

Classic ASP • T-SQL (Microsoft SQL Server) • FileMaker Pro • At its core, this is an 11,000-item database of the former Prime Minister’s utterances and documents. The site was originally programmed by a PBDH subcontractor, but I maintained it from 2002 to 2010. During that time I deeply refactored the ASP code and stored procedures for performance, stability, and maintainability. I also created a FileMaker-based “bulkloader” tool for offline record creation and batch upload. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Port of Seattle

HTML • Migration of 1,000 pages from crufty old tag soup to clean XHTML, Dreamweaver templates, and server-side includes. The cleanup and buildout involved lots of Perl and AppleScript. This files-and-folders version of the site has been going strong since 2006. Agency: PBDH. Visit site »

Technologies

I can go as abstract and theoretical as necessary, but I generally gravitate toward the useful and people-centered side of tech. I like making websites because I like being at that intersection between human and computer, facilitating. I also like making computers do work, so I enjoy automating processes, scripting, etc.

Drupal

I've been using it professionally since version 6 came out, and started using it for client sites once CCK and Views were ready.

Theming • I can do a fully custom theme, but normally I like to subtheme Zen. Lately I have also started to put templates and preprocessing at the module level, so that the theme itself can be swapped without having to duplicate a bunch of stuff.

CCK • I’m a big fan of custom field formatters; I love being able to give the user a plain-text field for data entry, but then scrub the output, add some specific markup, etc.

Views • Seems like I use it for everything. I can work with the default output, and understand the “sustainable” reasons for doing so. That said, I do love the simple markup and CSS I can get by using Semantic Views module.

Context • Love it, can’t build a site without it. Having a systematic approach to defining contexts can keep them from getting too confusing.

Features • I’ve tried it as a method for maintaining exportables via Drush, but so far my client sites haven’t had enough in common to employ Features in a reusable way.

Panels • I used Panels for the PBDH site, and got it working just fine with some custom layout plugins and so forth, but as a developer who can do the same things with theming instead, I found it cumbersome. I think Panels makes the most sense as a tool for the site builder who is not a coder.

Display Suite • This is a cool module and can eliminate the need for tpl files, but I am not 100% sold on it. A quirky UI and odd way of handling exportables makes it more of a hassle than it ought to be.

HTML/CSS

I know them inside out. My style is pretty conservative—instead of using fancy new features that need to be carefully tested all over the place, I’d rather write reliable code that has a high chance of working cross-browser the first time.

jQuery

jQuery is fun. Using it to manipulate the screen and respond to the user sometimes reminds me of my old Lingo/Director days. Check out The Bravern’s interactive map and Global’s home page for some examples.

Mapping/GIS

For the Global Diving site I learned how to make custom tiles using Mapnik and real GIS data (OSM coastlines), and used OpenLayers to plot projects on the maps. You can see the custom tiles on the home page and the project pages. For a while we had the “Where Today” map using them too (scalable/slippy), but the Google satellite view is more interesting.

Revision control

I got PBDH started on Subversion, and worked with that for a year or so. We switched over to Git once I really started collaborating with someone else and saw the value of easy branching and merging. I like Unfuddle for hosted Git/SVN.

Databases

I’m no DBA but I have created, managed, and used databases for a long time. I have done basic performance tuning on MySQL, dug into SQL Server for the Thatcher site, and, back in the day, knew all sorts of tricky FileMaker techniques.

Servers

I can set up a Linux Web server using command-line only, WHM/cPanel, Plesk, whatever. I have managed a Windows development server.

Computer languages

Over the years I have worked with (or at least dabbled in): BASIC (in HP, TRS-80, and AppleSoft flavors), 6502 Assembler, UCSD Pascal, AppleScript, UserTalk, Lingo, Java, HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, VBScript, SQL, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Bash shell, XML, XSLT.