Tim Foss, All Things Web

The Open Studio app for Facebook is a space where artists can upload their original works, browse through images from other artists around the world or send art as a gift to friends. The goal of Open Studio is to give struggling, young or undiscovered talent a chance at global exposure.

What I did

You name it! This project was my baby, along with my team at Epicsaurus. Content and marketing was handled by others on the team while I took charge of the development and design of the app. After the domain was registered and we chose a hosting service, I set up the Apache server, making sure the server was fully secure. I registered the Facebook application and used the Facebook API to develop the app.

I developed the back-end using the LAMP environment, which is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Then, I did all the front-end work with HTML, CSS and Javascript. I developed a secure and scaleable PHP framework, allowing for rapid development.

I worked with the Image Magic extension to convert and resize all the uploaded images so that the image quality was preserved and fit within the size constraints.

I created modules that encouraged communication among our users such as status updates, posting to other users' walls, image comments, gifts sent with messages attached and a news feed. I used the Facebook API to post to the Facebook news feed and send Facebook users messages. I created spots for a featured and most popular gift. The most popular gift was determined by a popularity algorithm that I wrote which calculated the popularity of gifts on a weighted system based on how many times an item was sent, viewed or commented on. This was all done with Ajax to create a seamless user experience with no need for refreshing the page.

I created a normalized relational database to store all the media content with proper indexing in order to optimize performance.