Roman Catalog

by Roberto on February 7, 2010

in Portfolio, Work

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The Roman graphic agency produces a resorts catalog for SudTirol AltaPusteria Valley.
I developed for them 5 years ago a PHP application that permits to collect data from every single resort and export them in a format compatible with Adobe InDesign to create the PDF files necessary to create the paper catalog.
In these months we decided to rebuild the application to add new features and reduce the manual work for creating the catalog, producing the PDF parts with the data of every resort directly from the application.
The web application has been re-written from scratch using Drupal.

Every resort has his own account where it can manages its resorts.
Additional supervisor roles have been created for power users who need to supervise the data entry.
Many features have been developed using Drupal contrib modules, but many others have been custom developed to make the data entry easier.
The web application is multilingual : English, German and Italian.

The most challenging feature has been the creation of high quality PDF to build the paper catalog.
We needed some special features like over printing and precise elements positioning.
After several tests I choose TCPDF library to create the PDF files, due to its completeness of features.

A special feature has been created that permits to compare the data currently collected with data snapshot saved in the past.
A configuration panel permits to the administrators to control the period when the data gathering is allowed, the data snapshot creation and some application specific settings.

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Homelingua maps integration

by Roberto on February 7, 2010

in Portfolio, Work

Homelingua.com Maps

I worked together with Paul Evans on Google Maps integration on Homelingua website.
We introduced the support for location module and geo-referenced every location place : city, region, attractions …
Every place is automatically geo-referenced using its city and zip.
For every place, the list of nearest airports, attractions and cities are showed within a user defined range and the distance between the main place and the others are automatically computed using latitude and longitude.
To create this map of England I created a special interface using Google maps API where Paul drawed graphically the regions borders directly in the web browser.

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Talks : Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom

December 14, 2009

“Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working [...]

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Book : The best that money can’t buy

October 31, 2009
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"Jacque Fresco envisions a global civilization in which science and technology are applied with human and environmental concern to secure, protect, and encourage a more humane world for all people. This book offers a possible way out of our recurring cycles of boom and recession, famine, poverty, a declining environment, and territorial conflicts where peace [...]

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Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification

October 29, 2009

The rise of CO2 (Carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere has not only the effect to rise the Earth temperature, to melt the glaciers and to rise the seas levels around our world. Recent studies demonstrate that it causes also the acidification of the water in the oceans.
This acidification will destroy many marine life forms.
More information

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Book : CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development

September 25, 2009
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Title : CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development
Authors : David Upton
CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework created by EllisLab. CodeIgniter has been used as foundation for the new upcoming version of EllisLab CMS ExpressionEngine.
CodeIgniter has already a very exhaustive documentation that describes in depth its API and provides useful examples.
This book isn’t a reference of [...]

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