New York City

We’re super proud to introduce the new web home of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a literally world-renowned nonprofit. Tanenbaum brings together people of different faiths by guiding schools, workplaces, and medical institutions and honoring peacemakers of wartorn regions.

The list of religious and political dignitaries*, corporations**, universities***, and charities**** who support Tanenbaum — via financial support, accolades, or contributions — is completely ridiculous. I offer you mere samples of each:

*: Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Kofi Annan, Madeline Albright, Joe Lieberman
**: Walt Disney Company, Conde Nast, Verizon, Kraft, Prudential, Shell, Viacom
***: Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, George Mason, Fordham, Columbia
****: Carnegie Corporation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Merril Lynch & Co. Foundation

And many many more. Somewhere in there, there’s little old us.

Tanenbaum’s old site was static (AKA hard to update, inflexible, and hard to expand) and didn’t present the clearest picture of exactly what they do.

They wanted to distinguish their programs from each other in an obvious visual way, instead of having only one look for the entire site. Being able to update their own content at the drop of a hat was also on the shopping list.

Looking over their content management system options, they narrowed it down to Drupal, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, and Moveable Type.

Already leaning towards going open source, Tanenbaum was impressed by Drupal’s flexibility.

So (PRESTO) we created a custom Drupal build for Tanenbaum, as we’re known to do from time to time. We developed:

• a complete E-commerce solution allowing sales, donations, and gifts
• Google Maps and social media integration
• different sections for each program
• a promo ad management system
• forums
• a couple dozen distinct content types
• Views/CCK-based automagical content displays
• easy-to-create photo galleries
• and a roped-off section offering premium content for paying members.

Pulling over and restructuring all their content followed, plus some proofing along the way. Tanenbaum’s old blog was hosted at wordpress.com, so we brought that on over into the new Drupal site too, consolidating their web presence and brand into one much-improved location.

So YEP we’re happy Tanenbaum’s new Drupal site is live and firing, and now we’re on to the on on to the next one.

• I’m sure many people caught the dichotomy between the New York Times’ puff piece on scammy Facebook gaming company Zynga (aka the people behind FarmParty or whatever) and TechCrunch’s super truth-diggy journalism on the same subject. Fake Steve collated the whole story well, so we’ll roll with his perspective.
• You know when you hear those stupid woe-is-us “91% of American high school seniors have never heard of Thomas Jefferson, Barack Obama, or God, but they know all the words to every rock ‘n’ roll song by Lil Diddy” things? You know how common sense always tells you that can’t possibly be true? Somebody finally put it to the test: Yes, the kids are allright. Of course they are. I mean, they have freaking Wikipedia to fall back on.
• The Yankees’ payroll is larger than the payrolls of several other teams combined. This may be possible to repeat often enough, but Joe Posnanski isn’t taking any chances; in fact, he’s written the perfect antidote to watching the Yankees try and squeeze into Everybody Doubted Us hats and We’re Just Having Fun Out There shirts.

• Artist recreates Manhattan skyline on 18’x3’ canvas, all from memory.
• Frowny-faced NFL player Larry Johnson’s feet really cover a lot of ground. Sadly, they find his mouth more often than they find the end zone. Jay Smooth sets LJ straight:
  
• Your weekly inspiration: At some point this week, it’ll be high time to give nary a crap what your bourgeois lawyer friends think, just like this man dancing with authority to MJ at the bus stop day in and day out:
  
  

The American Museum of Natural History, one of the world’s five most-visited museums, has had us create a subsite for the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival two years in a row. The sections needed to fit the website’s feel, but in a distinct fashion. We contributed custom PHP and themed up the site’s design, leaving breathing room for big, crisp, quick-loading images.

Armistead Booker, associate media designer at AMNH and this project’s point of contact, describes our coding contributions as a “completely overhauled backend to the site, which was a vast improvement from the festival site in previous years.” He also confirms that we were “on budget for this project … accommodating our demanding schedule and timing just as we requested.”

Be sure to click around the rest of the AMNH website so you can get a feel for how our contributions fit in.

Some AMNH fast facts:

• Founded in 1869
• Four million annual museum visitors
• 460,000 field-trip visitors annually
• 13 million annual website visitors
• 200 scientists on staff
• Over 90 publications per year
• International expeditions yielding 60,000+ new exhibit items annually

Much, much more on the museum here.

*

• A lengthly behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Beatles Rock Band game: While My Guitar Gently Beeps. Supplemental materials: the game’s more-or-less entire tracklist, and a hands-on.
• Been waiting all morning to see some ugly, really ugly couches formerly owned by the visionaries behind websites you use everyday? Your wait is over: Where 14 of the top internet businesses were started.
• A 73-year-old Harlem businessman defended himself and his employees from four robbers, neutralizing all four by firing only three shots! Safe to assume New York’s uptown criminals have marked his business with a Do Not Rob tag on their iPhone maps apps.

Bonus editorial commentary

Some deserve second chances: Philadelphia Eagles head coach talks about signing Mike Vick. Other items have had more than sufficient opportunities to get with the program: IE6 Cannot Die.