Red Nose Day 2011
June 23, 2010
So, my first full campaign as comic reliefs senior developer, this gave me a lot of scope to oversee things that were happening on the website, giving me the chance to put in place more solutions which had site-wide repercussions, in a way being a drupal architect for the site it felt. This site, similar to previous site, was graphic heavy, using photo quality images, and gradients. This meant we had to use a lot of graphics within our css, making the filesize high if we hadn't been compressing the images. We also played with animated graphics on our logo, which generally we haven't done in the past, again due to filesizes. The site was another step forward on the CMS front, as we started to add videos using the CMS more, and at times, handed over certain content types to other teams. We still couldn't hand over as much as we would like due to the design restrictions on some pages, but it was definately going in the right direction. We also decided to try playing with an .ics file on the homepage to allow users to save the date, we hadn't previously used this as a lot of users may not understand what to do with it, but it had been requested by users in a general way to add to their email calendars, so we set something up for it. Due to it's complex nature, we re-used the tv-listing setup from the previous campaign, with a few tweaks to improve it, saving us a lot of time, and allowing focus on other sites. One of the large challenges on this campaign was the desert trek, which was a more complex build than originally thought as it required a merged view pulling in tweets with thumbnails pulled from yfrog dynamically and save as an external imagecache file. During this project we also had our first play with the Varnish reverse proxy.