The second iteration would have commenting, promotion coupons, and cleaner integration with the Zazzle store.  It would also run on its own domain, rockyrocksdesigns.com. Kristien provided me with the graphics but I had to integrate them with CSS and HTML. The Wordpress template was designed and customized so that Rocky’s dialogue bubble would always have something context-sensitive to say.

At every step of the way the customer and co-worker, my wife, was sitting next to me and providing feedback.  If an image wasn’t right, she fixed it. If the CSS/formatting wasn’t right, I fixed it. The result is something that’s altogether mine, hers, and ours.  The site went live on March 18, 2010.

The core of the website is built with WordPress since it provides a good balance of capability and simplicity. Even though a site may start with a few requirements, that can easily change with time. Keeping design simple and flexible in the beginning is a key to enabling rapid changes in the future. The template itself is an amalgam of modified CSS and newly-coded PHP. Again, not too much PHP. The header is a custom graphic of which many iterations were created. However, the solution with the most appeal had the fewest colors.

The template and style sheets were thoroughly tested with Internet Explorer and Firefox. After hosting set-up and configuration, I uploaded the site and it went live the evening of February 11, 2008.

I immediately went to work when I heard the Association had no online presence. I used WordPress for its flexible plug-in support and the modified the default template to use a custom header. As Secretary/Treasurer I thought creating a website wasn’t enough to fulfill my role on the Board. With my wife’s help we converted approximately 30 pages of Association documents to digital format. The grainy 20^th generation photocopies made my OCR software choke, so with time and effort it was all manually transcribed. Residents can open any document and easily search for keywords.

There wasn’t a lot of information to reformat so the job was finished quickly. I believe it was a quarterly publication, so each quarter we would post an index of the articles. That aside, the rest of the site was boilerplate information you see in every edition.

Every site I designed up to this point was static. The only exception might be some temporary dabbling with SSI (server side includes) that I never quite liked. This was my first attempt at using PHP and I really enjoyed it.

Once this site was complete and we passed the course, it served no further purpose. I moved on to MBA courses and said farewell to web design for at least another year.

The site didn’t start with a mission statement. It was focused on content. I would write articles based on science and technology each week. Some weeks I felt like the site was controlling my schedule. Rather than have it work for me, it was working against me. This is why most blogs fade away. People don’t want to feel obliged to write something—anything—just to fill their site with text.

This version of unsaturated.com sports the earth/globe logo. After 15 updates the site was no longer updated. The next version utilized the “online portfolio” concept that you see today.

You can see that blue was (and still is) my favorite color. Studies have shown it’s also the most popular color. I created a custom watermark of the TBP Bent—the object shown behind all the links. By now I had fully realized graphic design can make or break a website’s first impression.

This site was low on content. I scanned a company patch and converted a VHS tape to RealMedia format. This was around the year 2000 so RealMedia (RM files) were the dominant format. The website itself didn’t take long to design and this was the first where I used CSS. In particular, I like the background I designed. A company that “drills” down to extreme depths is symbolized by the wedge that tapers towards the bottom of the screen.

I’ve never posted my full resume on a website because I think reading resumes is boring. This is the new millennium, right? Why aren’t you marketing your experiences online? Selling who you are and what you’ve done is much easier when it’s presented in this format. Tabular or bulleted data is great for information transfer but not for conveying a set of experiences. That’s what I tried to do here, and what unsaturated.com is still doing today

From time to time, when not making copies and researching historical information, I would work on the site. After several months it became my only task. I decided to try some new ideas with this site: frames, animation, and background images. I used clip art extensively.

Sadly, this site is still better than most MySpace pages. What I now consider clutter and waste—animation, video, music, and backgrounds all rolled onto the same page, is actually the norm for a MySpace profile.

After designing this site I realized there’s truth to the phrase “less is more.” The site was briefly mentioned in the Sheriff’s 1997 annual report. Towards the end of my student clerkship, I received a letter of commendation from the Sheriff for all my hard work.

A search for “The Simpsons” would now yield thousands of pages. When this site was first designed, those sites were few in number and Google didn’t even exist. When I used to live in Naples, Florida my friends and I took advantage of the Naples Freenet. It offered free dial-up access at 14.4 Kbps, which later increased to 56K, and a limited amount of storage space. I believe it was 1MB.

That was enough space to kick-start The Simpsons Sound Clip of the Week. Maybe three or four students had their own website back in 1996. I was one of them. The graphics on the site make an interesting story. I used to have a Simpsons screen saver and let’s just say I borrowed the graphics for a limited time. I was new to graphic design, buy my friend Dan knew how to make transparent backgrounds.

The sound clip was uploaded in WAV format. Over time, I started to neglect the site and rarely captured new clips. College was rapidly approaching and I had other priorities. Those were the salad days of web design.

This project earned my group an “A” in undergraduate Senior Design. The premise of Senior Design class is that a group of students must design and build an original product. We arrived at this unusual idea because one group member was a former horse owner and our professor’s contribution was “make it web-enabled.” Thus, we had an idea that was truly original and we set out to build it. A little background information on horse feeders will help to clarify the project.

Current Feeders

Current automated horse feeders use mechanical and/or electrical timing devices to dispense feed at regular intervals. Power is usually supplied through a 12-volt battery, a 110-volt outlet, or even solar power. Generally, there are two mechanisms: one is a timer and the other a measurer. When the timing mechanism reaches the preset times, a motorized auger turns allowing grain to be dispensed. Timing mechanisms are somewhat simplistic and provide limited programming capability.

All feeders have override buttons to dispense grain manually. Few, if any, provide the ability to remotely control the parameters of a particular feeder. The user is limited to programming the device from the feeder itself. Every feeder that uses the current programming system must be individually programmed.

Current systems range in price with a low-end model selling for $285 and a high-end model for $865. No web-enabled models were found.

Our Feeder

The problems with current feeders centered on usability, scalability, and accessibility. After recognizing the problems/limitations of current feeders, our task was to find and implement a solution set. Our project addressed each of these concerns:

• Usability — we improved the range of usability and programability with a Z-World microcontroller. Using a multi-line LCD display, keypad, and the microcontroller, we expanded upon the usability constraints of other feeders. Users could log into the feeder using a password, program feed times, frequency, and feed quantities. Thus, the feeder could function independently from an internet connection. The microcontroller was coded in Dynamic C.
• Scalabilty — the server acts as the heart of the system. Users can register and control every feeder from one online location. In theory, the system can support an unlimited number of horse feeders. The only limitations are server speed and storage capacity. We also added a camera to the system. Thus, the user could see the horse (if it was near the feeder), set feed times and amounts, and view a log file of all feeder events. The server was running Red Hat Linux and a MySQL database. The microcontroller interface was coded in C and C++. The web interface was coded entirely in PHP.
• Accessibility — as mentioned earlier, the system allows the user to program the feeder locally (at the feeder itself) or remotely (from the web site). Although feed times will vary infrequently, the concept proves that such a system increases the horse owner’s ability to monitor what is happening.

The following diagram illustrates the basic operation of our system:

Marketing

From a marketing standpoint the web-enabled, automated feeder could be sold as a service. Consider a potential customer looking for a way to fill his horse stalls. He buys several feeders and subscribes to the online service. He then distributes feeders to paying clients who want to care for their own horses. This fee provides the clients with a horse feeder and all the remote accessibility features.

Conclusion

This project was both fun and educational. It also proves that such a system is viable and practical for a segment of the horse-owning population. Having an excellent team also helped to make this an enjoyable experience. Our test subject, Reno, also thought highly of our project.

Appendix

Many of these images were created for documentation purposes. The help section of Reno Server provided these screen captures with a thorough explanation of each. The feeder itself was also well documented.

• Feeder Hardware: The feeder hardware was donated to our group from a local horse owner and engineer located in Sanford, FL. We were very grateful because this gave us the necessary mechanical components and allowed us to focus on the computer engineering aspects of the project.
• Reno: Our sponsor allowed us to visit his horse, which immediately became our group mascot. It’s always good to meet the end user.
• Login: This page welcomes every user to the Reno Server.
• Registration: This step is required to use the service.
• User Page: Once the user has added a feeder to the system this page will display summary information. The system allows n number of feeders per user, which is great for a stable.
• Feed Times: Times are displayed and can be updated, deleted, or added to each feeder. Quantity can be varied for each feeding time.
• Feed History: All events are logged in the database.
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