Craig Ruksznis

Site Work

• January/2012

  Celebrate What Works

  For GE, Welikesmall built a site where users can submit photos to celebrate what works in America. I built a custom CMS to control all major aspects of the site (winners, photo moderation, weekly judges and themes, etc). I also cut up the designs into HTML5, JS, and CSS. The site required logging in through Facebook or Twitter and then submitting photos via Facebook, Instagram or from your computer so I wrote a number of jQuery plugins to take care of authorization, submitting a photo, and a modal handler.

• November/2011

  The Academy Awards

  Welikesmall was tasked with wireframing, designing and cutting the design up into modular code pieces for the 2012 Oscars. Another coworker and I were tasked with cutting up the designs. Notable pieces I did were the overall site header and footer and the history page (including the Javascript to transition between years and decades, as well as the JSON structure and AJAX calls to pull new data in for a new timeframe).

• October/2011

  Moment Skis

  My job on this site was to put together the backend of this site. We went with Python/Django/MySQL and a shopping cart system called Satchmo. Satchmo also required me to install Fedex/USPS plugins and AuthorizeNet. I also wrote the JS that controls the product image zooming.

• September/2010

  Noted

  A coworker and I were lamenting on how much could be improved with the current wikis on the market in terms of design and usability, so we decided to take a crack at it. Of note in the codebase is a versioning class, where Will refactored diff functionality and I ported over patch functionality from Python. I also designed the entire app as well as the frontend site, which both feature HTML5 with full support of IE6-9, Safari 3+, FF 3+, and Chrome. I also used media queries on the frontend site to create optimized versions for iOS and Android based devices.

• November/2010

  Desktone

  Upon a tight deadline I wrote the front-end and back-end code for this site in two weeks. This included a custom CMS for the blog, events, partners, news, as well as tagging abilities on blogs. I cut up the site into strict XHTML 1.0, and integrated any jQuery necessary (including the homepage slideshow and an HTML5 video player that sat in a modal window). I also integrated a third party vendor with multiple contact forms. And what an amazing client Desktone was to work with! They were easy to find solutions with, extremely responsive, and were quite timely.

• August/2010

  JavaScript Standards

  I wrote the initial draft and led all subsequent iterations on a standards manual for JavaScript at iMarc. This included not only JavaScript but also standards for jQuery as well.

• May/2010

  Harpo Creative Works

  On the side I built a site through Interactology to build Harpo Creative Works a new website. They provided a fluid design and I cut it up and integrated into ExpressionEngine 2.0. All of their works are dynamic thanks to EE, and they have the ability to add any audio, video, or photo as a piece and the system knows how to treat each accordingly. Of particular interest is the fact that the client only has to enter in the URL of a video work and the site knows to parse it and show it in a modal window on the fly.

• December/2009

  ID

  Upon realizing that iMarc had many internal sites where usernames and passwords were all stored separately, I tackled building a secure, single sign-on service for all sub-sites of iMarc. This meant writing the initial code base as well as collaborating with coworkers during regular meetings to ensure that the code was solid. All information sent from Identity is encrypted into HMAC strings using public key encryption (OpenSSL), and then SHA-256 is run on those strings. All sessions are restricted to https by running the core service under an SSL to prevent session fixation. Each user has a GUID, and information is pushed (in JSON) whenever asked for by the remote site (typically during log in but can asked at any time).