About Brian Warren

Brian Warren is a web designer and developer, living in Denver, Colorado. His tiny company is Be Good Not Bad, and he is a part of the ExpressionEngine Professional Network.

How did you get into the web professional business and did it involve Frontpage (be honest)?

Brian Warren: I initially got involved in the web back in college when some friends of mine were starting a business making interactive cd-roms for universities. I started helping them build their website. I don’t think Frontpage existed yet. In fact, neither did Dreamweaver. We were using Adobe PageMill 1.0. I remember when Dreamweaver 1.0 came out. It was a pretty big deal.

Shortly after college I got a job as a print designer, putting my Graphic Design degree to good use. The company employing me was a non-profit and gave me lots of free time to learn the web. I taught myself CSS & XHTML while building a content management system with some friends of mine.

A few years ago I quit my job and started working for myself, doing web design. It was right around then I started using ExpressionEngine.

What’s Animal Internet about and who is behind it?

Brian Warren: Animal Internet is a site where people can sign up as their pet and connect with other pets online. You are the Human Typing Assistant, and, on your pet’s behalf, can upload photos, write “animatorials” (long form blog entries) or share “opinions” (quick 25-word or less opinions or questions). There are a lot of social networks for pets out there, but none with this comedic take, giving the bullhorn to the animals themselves.

Animal Internet is run by Billiam Coronel, a hollywood comedy writer. It was entirely his idea. He’s a funny, opinionated guy who’s super creative and not afraid to jump right in and get his hands dirty helping out with a project. It was Billiam who contacted me initially about the project. Mark Bixby did the design.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine for it?

Brian Warren: Honestly, when I first read all the requirements for this project, I didn’t think ExpressionEngine was up to the task. I contacted a PHP developer friend of mine, Corey Snipes, asking him what he thought about building some added functionality on top of ExpressionEngine to handle all this extra stuff. He, having never used ExpressionEngine at all, said why not, let’s do it.

It turned out ExpressionEngine was up to the task after all. It’s really a testament to not only the extensive built-in functionality, but the extensibility of the application. By the end of it, Corey was sold, wanting to use it on future projects of his own.

What aspect of the site are you most proud of from a developer standpoint?

Brian Warren: Wow, one thing is hard to choose, but I’ll try.

The way that the site is set up, you, as the Human Typing Assistant, are a single member of the site, yet you sign up any number of animals underneath you. The animals are the ones who do the blogging, and comment on each others’ posts. When you comment on someone else’s post, you select the animal doing the commenting first, and leave the comment. That animal’s avatar shows up with their name and link to their profile on the site. It’s the same thing when you enter in posts on the site as well.

Of course none of that functionality really exists out of the box. We had to write quite a bit of extra stuff to make it happen. In the end, the animals are actual weblog entries, and the add-ons that we wrote did the heavy lifting to make the connections. Since so much of this was outside the box, and somewhat oddly connected together, we made heavy use of the stand-alone entry form. In the end, the users never end up seeing the back-end of the site.

I have to hand it to Corey Snipes, my co-developer on this project. We had countless discussions on just how on earth we would approach this and many more tricky things in the project. He did some amazing work adding onto ExpressionEngine.

How does Billiam like working with ExpressionEngine?

Brian Warren: You know, he just dove right in and started using it, without any complaints (or training by us) whatsoever. In fact, as we migrated all of his old content from his old .NET site, he actually went in and did some of the work by hand. He didn’t have to, he just worked crazy fast.

I’m sure since we’ve pushed the envelope a bit with ExpressionEngine, that he might be frustrated with some things here and there. But all in all he found it pretty easy to get in and get stuff done.

Do you have pets and did you sign them up?

Brian Warren: I did, just so I could use it and try out features as I was building them. I actually don’t have any pets anymore, unless you count my daughter as an “animal”.

What’s next for you?

Brian Warren: I’m finishing up an ExpressionEngine project right now for the American Institute of Architects, Kansas City Chapter (still a couple weeks from launch). The next big fun project I’m working on is for some scientists at Harvard. I don’t think I can say too much yet about it, but around late winter, I’ll be shouting it from the mountaintops. I also have some fun side-projects, all too secret to talk about, so alas, nothing too exciting to mention right now.