Site Launch: FlatBen.org
FlatBen.org
Site Brief
Flat Ben started as a small project for a small boy. He is a combination of the story book character & international literacy project promoter, Flat Stanley, with my oldest nephew, Ben.
When I moved from Iowa to South Korea in 2005, Ben’s aunt told me about the Flat Stanley books and asked if I would take photos with “Flat Ben” on my travels. The original idea was to put the photos together and give them to Ben on his birthday the following year. Only we didn’t return the following year…we’re still exploring.
So now its 2009 and I’ve finally put together a place to show all my nieces & nephews (not just Ben) where Flat Ben & I have traveled.
"A Drive Through the Balkans"
Technical Stuff
The site is built as a custom component on the Joomla! content management system. I used the GoogleMaps API to geotag all the photos along with Xiaoxi Wu’s MarkerClusterer to handle large groups of markers. All of the non-GoogleMaps javascript was done using the MooTools 1.11 framework.
I’m still working on ways to get the pages to load faster, so any advice would be appreciated.
