We’re very excited to have just helped the International Women’s Health Coalition launch their Young Visionaries campaign! Young Visionaries is a contest designed to help youth who are inspired by human rights and women’s health share their visions for change, and win grants to continue their work. The general public can vote for their favorite visionaries, with final awards decided by IWHC’s panel of guest judges.

Young Visionaries is built on top of Akimbo, the WordPress-powered main IWHC blog. The nomination form allows youth to describe their vision, upload a photo, embed a video, and link to their web site or online profile. We’re using the herculean TDO Mini Forms plugin to provide a usable interface for submission of the nomination form, the Vote It Up plugin for the voting, the Vipers Video Quicktags plugin for handling of the videos, and the Cycle Lite jQuery plugin for the front page slideshow.

On the front end, the application ties in to the impressive Thesis theme already used by Akimbo, functioning essentially as a sub-theme for that section of the site. We used Thesis’ extensive customization and hook structure for most of the Young Visionaries sub-theme, though we did have to modify a couple of core Thesis files to facilitate the sub-theme. Tying it all together is our own custom logic and “glue code”, and theme files specific to Young Visionaries.

A diverse group of Young Visionaries have already been nominated! Have a look and vote for your favorite, or maybe even encourage someone you know to nominate his/herself.

Check out the IWHC Young Visionaries web application on Akimbo!

We just launched threeintentions.com, a web site that will build a community around the idea of the mind / body / spirit connection. The site provides related resources and represents teachers working in the field.

Three Intentions is organized by Brooke Warner, based in Berkeley, who Bad Feather and I worked with closely from conception and initial sketches, to branding and site mocks, to execution in WordPress. The site provides profile information, a blog platform, and event organization for Brooke and the Three Intentions teachers, whose numbers will be growing as the site gains traction.

Take a break from your daily grind to stop by threeintentions.com, and be sure to let Brooke know that Dtek and Bad Feather sent you.

It’s already the 11th, but happy 2010! The new year is an obvious opportunity to reflect on what’s passed, and plan for the future. Truthfully, though, an exciting period of review and growth started a few months ago for Dtek.

With new partnerships underway, forward-thinking new projects in development, and a whole slew of adjustments in my personal life the winds of change have been blowing for a while now.

First off, Dtek’s rates hadn’t changed since 2007, so our hourly rate has now increased, and our time will now be billed in increments of 1/2 hour. (Okay, so in addition to the more imaginative changes are the less romantic ones ) Existing maintenance retainers will of course honor the quoted rate. Please inquire any time for details, or to get a quote for your next project.

We’re also overdue to overhaul this web site. (We’ve spoken with many of you already about our cobbler’s shoes!) The current incarnation of dtek.net went live way back in (gasp) 2005! It’s been modified and updated in a piecemeal way since then, and has generally served us well, but look for a shiny new version of the site this year that better represents Dtek as a company.

And many other changes are percolating…

What hasn’t changed is our commitment to provide high quality web development services for independent and progressive organizers, entrepreneurs, educators and artists. We’re grateful as always to be able to work with such inspiring folks.

Here’s to a healthy and productive year!

Digital School Solutions is a new child company of long-time Dtek client Aussie, focused specifically on the technological side of Aussie’s broader school professional development mission. According to DSS: “Digital School Solutions is committed to helping schools and districts re-think teaching and learning to transform themselves into vibrant 21st century learning communities.”

Just before the winter break, we helped DSS launch their new Drupal-powered web site. Under the hood, the site is very similar to Aussie’s site, functioning essentially as a Drupal multi-site (technical challenges of multi-sites with SSL using cPanel to be written up in a future blog post!).

Like Aussie’s site, the DSS site features the custom paid event registration system we helped Growing Venture Solutions develop, as well as audio and video content, blogging, fine-tuned user management, and all of Drupal’s standard content management goodness.

On the front-end, the DSS site was designed to match Aussie’s site, with the DSS logo and a modified color scheme. The front page sports a jQuery-based slideshow, editable by site administrators, rather than the Flash movie used on Aussie’s site. Numerous theme improvements and further Drupal 6 optimizations were made in the process.

Visit the new DSS site at digitalschoolsolutions.com, and stay tuned for more DSS and Aussie news.

Though I haven’t posted here in a while (look for updates next month!), I’ve been busy working on some exciting projects. So much so, that I’ve been looking for help…

Dtek evolved to its present form a few years ago as co-founder Rhys Daunic built up a full workload of media education consulting services with The Media Spot. That made me essentially a one-man operation, though I continued to partner with similar shops and freelancers on a project-basis, chief among these being the tight partnership I have with the design and coding team at Bad Feather. Now Dtek is poised to enter a new period of growth as we’re building more substantial web sites that require more resources, code, and maintenance, as well as continuing to maintain long-term relationships with many existing clients.

So I’m thrilled to have Greg Lyle on board in a consulting role. As a developer and systems administrator with a strong Unix and Free and Open Source Software background, Greg is in a great spot to help expand the services that Dtek is offering in exactly the ways that our clients need. He’s worked with a couple of other Drupal-focused web development shops in the past, and worked on a diverse set of projects including a back-end web site for a 2008 presidential campaign.

Hopefully Greg and I will make great strides together — look for more out of Dtek from this new working relationship! But first, time for a few days off for the holiday