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

Highest Common Denominator Media Group is a Brooklyn- and Dallas-based film company that has produced some inspiring projects. The Farm: 10 Down, which re-examines the lives of six inmates in Louisiana’s maximum-security Angola prison, 10 years after HCD’s award-winning The Farm first introduced us to them, premiered on the National Geographic channel on Tuesday.

Before the film premier, we worked with HCD to do some serious spring cleaning to their existing WordPress-powered web site. We audited the site, rewrote large portions of their custom theme, cut the number of plugins used on the site by more than half, removed and secured some potentially dangerous code, and worked with HCD to help them better understand how to manage their site.

Thanks to Bad Feather for the introduction! We look forward to continuing our work with HCD, helping them make more proactive and forward-thinking changes to their web sites and online tools, and generally support them in their mission of telling compelling stories that inspire us to action.

Many of the folks we work with want to display video on their web sites. Hosting video on their own web servers has some obvious advantages in terms of control, but is often too resource-intensive and expensive. That’s when existing video hosting providers come into play.

Unfortunately, this is a great example of where it’s easy to follow the trends without considering some of the bigger implications, like the way our content is licensed, whether we want X company to profit off of our content, and generally what type of network we want to build as a community.

A friend recently pointed us to a post on wordpress.com entitled: Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared. It’s a great starting point for considering the privacy/licensing, ownership, and legal complaint recourse terms of the various big name video hosts out there.

Kudos to the article author, and here’s to all of us raising our collective awareness of these issues.

We recently worked with Bad Feather to help Paula Murray Cole and the folks at rasaboxes develop a web site for building community around their innovative performance technique.

What is “rasaboxes”? I’m not a dancer, so i’ll quote from the new web site:

Devised in the 1980s and 90s by Richard Schechner, rasaboxes offers performers a concrete physical tool to access, express, and manage their feelings/emotions within the context of performance. Useful as performer training, rasaboxes also has many other applications in various fields including (but not limited to) therapy, business, and education.

Paula and co are off and running at rasaboxes.org, managing all of their site content and developing their membership. The site is built on WordPress, features informational, news, and “members-only” content, as well as tying-in to rasaboxes’ existing mailing list and donation services.

The site is rasaboxes.org.

We built a web site for the Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier project (VUHID; pronounced “view-hid”) a year and a half ago. Since then, Global Patient Identifiers, Inc (GPII) was formed as a parent company for VUHID.

Working with Bad Feather, we created a new identity and logo for GPII, updated the VUHID logo for visual consistency, and reworked the web site to be the combined home for both GPII and VUHID. See the new GPII identity, and the latest on the VUHID project, at gpii.info.

Through VUHID, GPII hopes to improve healthcare through a slew of benefits to all the related stakeholders, while taking privacy concerns very seriously.

Keep up the good work, GPII!