Category: web

Articles in the ‘Web’ category could be about a wide variety of subjects and it might be more specifically about web technology, much like the code category. Or it could be the next best cat video trending on YouTube?

  • 2025

    2025

    After launching three eCommerce websites on Shopify in April, I was laid off when CoffeeAm was sold to a company in Colorado. Those three sites were over a year’s work and over a thousand product graphics made in .GIMP. And that came after a vacation with my family. This is the life of a marketer – always vulnerable in a lay off.

    The good news is I was scooped up by a local manufacturer that produces outdoor displays. All their displays are high-end and engineered to withstand just about any thing thrown at them. But please don’t throw things at our displays. The company has over 25 thousand displays shipped in countries all over the planet.

    I was hired to create and maintain their social media accounts and push their marketing online through Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are two brands – BoldVu and MRI. MRI is a bit tricky as there is an ocean of content already bearing that term. After getting that off the ground and establishing a pattern of posts I turned my focus on their sites.

    The first site was set up with a proprietary theme hosted on WP Engine. The walled off theme replaced the Gutenberg block system with it’s own so I replaced the theme with a child theme of Frost; a free theme from WP Engine. The second I built in the spring of 2026 using a the same approach with Frost. Both are up and available on BoldVu.com and MRI-Inc.net.

    Up until 2026, I was using AI as a jump start on content and as assistance with large blocks of code. At MRI, I’m leaning into it by build a whole suite of WordPress plugins. It also batch processes large sets of images – cropping, color adjustments, exposure, and a bit of filling in. The filling in works like the stamp tool but it just isn’t as good as manually adding edge filler in GIMP.

    2025 was a year I dedicated to leaving Microsoft Windows and Adobe in favor for open source. So, now I’m running fully on Pop!_OS, Pulsar, Shotcut, OBS Studio, Android Studio (for Flutter), GIMP, Blender, and Figma or Inkscape. I’m almost completely off print work but I did have a client request a simple poster in June.

    Also, I moved everything I could off of AWS. We’re done with that. The pricing was too complicated – hidden costs in “free” services that turned out to not be free. I’m now hosting three sites and an app (gunicorn+flask) which is turned off and costs nothing, all on Digital Ocean. The prices is less than half of what I was paying.

  • Gourmet Coffees

    Gourmet Coffees

    On April 7th, myself and Artic Leaf launched a website: GourmetCoffess.com. This redesign, of an outdated eCommerce site was a very long time in the making. There were a number of things I took away from this project and can now apply those processes to two more sites in development. From the site, you can see that there’s a much cleaner look overall for gourmet coffees. The font is now a reasonable size and the colors follow a design pattern.

    There was a massive life with the product graphics. There was a “waterfall” incident as well, but I won’t write about that here. That said, there are 180 product images, each with a unique background, a group label at the bottom, and text on the label which was adjusted for each. Originally, there would have been double that and miscommunication led to the waterfall moment. I was the primary person driving the product with a considerable amount of assistance from Kelly @ Artic Leaf.

    There were a handful of integrations that were pulled into the new site with the largest being Klaviyo. The flows/automation was duplicated from another site and a fun little bug hunt trying to connect the _dmarc record which require the value to be wrapped in double quotations. A support ticket notifying their team was sent in the hope it will help someone else out there hitting the same brick wall. Using .liquid, I created custom page and collection templates as requested.

    Enjoy!

    https://gourmetcoffees.com

    Before:

    After:

    If you have questions about the process, the graphics, the software used or something else related to this project, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to discuss this or other site plans for business. If you’re wondering, this is a custom version of the default theme for Shopify: Dawn.

     

  • SQWKLER

    SQWKLER

    Due to the absolute lack of interest in SQWKLER, I didn’t hype it up or post much about it. It’s always interesting (and humbling) to create something, along with a lot of invested time, and the reception is, “Okay.” I was even asked why I did it. It’s a good question and totally valid. Here’s my reason: It is a project I can use in my portfolio and I wanted to. I’m not trying to be a jerk, it’s just that I don’t have a lot that I can call my own and the majority of my time is used to help my employer or my clients.

    Approach

    I started SQWKLER with a basic Flutter app and set out to add authentication. Flutter and Firebase are both open source and free to use with freemium and priced plans. Authentication allows for user creation and each user can then create their own profile. That was it – a starter app + authentication. Should be easy right? You know darn well it wasn’t. There are two tutorials that flat out don’t work, one that creates all of the functionality that’s already written by Google, and then the one I eventually found which still had a hurdle to get over. The experience was only slightly frustrating so I reassessed the process.

    Features

    This was towards the beginning of 2024 and I was already using AI for a number of things. I remember the feeling of “Oh WOW, why didn’t I think of this earlier,” when I realized that ChatGPT works with .dart. Boom – instant progress. I started to blow through bugs, long docs, large functions and classes, and I then dropped $9 on a month of top tier ChatGPT which gave me more time and late nights of productivity. I moved from Authentication to Firestore Database and Storage which enables livestreams.

    Finish

    From there I added an “about” screen (section) and took the livestreams further with “flocks” which are more or less “groups.” With ChatGPT, there were still hurdles, but they were overcome so quickly that it was mind bending. I couldn’t believe how fast it was. I don’t want to give away the entire process of the project and the other functionality I created for it, but the last two features were private messaging and then I hosted it – again, free with Google Firebase.

    Alongside Altimeter, this is software. This is what I love to do.