Read the full article here.

The new website for Archbishop Rummel made its official debut on Thursday after much effort from several key persons, particularly Brian Rodriguez, ’02, and senior Adam Landreneau, ’11.  When the idea was first realized  for updating the school’s website, Advancement Director Cory Howat and Communications Director Joseph Serio solicited the assistance of web design expert and alumnus Rodriguez, who is president of Gatorworks Web Design (www.gatorworks.net)  in Baton Rouge and the son of faculty members Mr. David and Ms. Carol Rodriguez. He worked on the design and major aspects of the site with input from several school contributors.  When the site was ready for the school’s server, senior Landreneau took over the site and worked out the transfer details.  The new website is far from finished, as it’s a “work in progress” and numerous updates are already scheduled for future weeks.

Feel free to read the article on Rummel’s website here.

Rodriguez said, “I was very excited to see the conference quickly adopt our technology, and we hope to provide value to many future events of all sizes through both EventConnect.org and the iPhone app.”

Scheduled for April 8-11 in New Orleans, the SRLC is the most prominent GOP gathering outside of the national convention. Confirmed speakers include Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Tax Gov. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and more. The SRLC will be carried on Fox and CNN, and Sean Hannity will broadcast live. More than 3,500 people are expected to participate.

EventConnect.org is an online social networking platform for conferences, conventions, tradeshows, and events of all sizes. The website is simple to use and integrates many existing social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Here is a quick tour of the main areas of the site:

Once the child creates an account, he/she will be greeted by the elf and see this home page. This is Santa's Island where the child can begin their journey!

If the child clicks on the snowman, he/she will see a naked snowman with a box that contains various articles of clothing and accessories. The child can click and drag the items over to the snowman to create one of their own. If an article of clothing doesn’t look just right, then the child can drag the item over to the trash can to remove it.

We decided to make a cowboy, bowler Snowman!

If the child goes over to Santa’s Mailroom, he/she will see a very active room with letters being sucked down a pipeline and being dropped into a pile in the center of the room. A friendly elf is quickly sorting the letters into “naughty” or “nice” pipelines that go directly to Santa’s office. If the child clicks on the colored letters on the ground, he/she can read a letter written from other children to Santa.

The Elf in Santa's Mailroom quickly sorts letters from children across the world.

Santa’s Toy Factory is my favorite part of the website. This is where children can see the worker elves in action making plenty of toys. There’s a countdown to Christmas on the wall at the top right, and the child has the option to click on a toy of their choice on the conveyor belt. If the child clicks on a toy, a window will pop-up that pulls the actual image of the product from Amazon. Then, the child has the option to add the toy to his/her “wishlist.”

Toys are quickly being assembled by elves in Santa's Toy Factory.

The final component of the site allows the child to email Santa Claus, and the child has the option to include items in the email that they selected from Santa’s Toy Factory.

So, as you can see, this was a rather involved project that required a great deal of custom illustration and then custom animation (and action script) using Adobe Flash. We were very excited to win an ADDY for this project at the 2010 awards show this year.

I invite you to visit the actual site so you can see these screenshots come to life and hear the jolly Christmas music we have playing in the background. If you have children, I encourage you to let them visit the site and have some fun next Christmas!

Do you like this site? Check out some other completed projects by our award-winning team.

With more than 60,000 entries annually, the national ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from around the world. The American Advertising Federation conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry.

This year’s local competition produced 446 entries from Baton Rouge professionals and LSU students. Judging was held January 16, 2010 at Lamar Advertising. Renee Miller, President/Creative Director of The Miller Group in Los Angles, Ca.; Jim Dudley, Broadcast, Copywriter, Creative Director of Dudley Creative in Roanoke, Va.; and Jimmy Ball, Art Director/Designer, Photographer, Interactive of Jimmy Ball Design in Dallas, Texas, served as judges for the competition.

Gatorworks brought home a Silver ADDY award for their client project, Santa’s Online Wishlist. Santa’s Online Wishlist is an interactive website where children can dress a snowman, have fun in Santa’s Toy Factory, view Santa’s Mailroom, and best of all send emails to Santa Claus. The website took approximately 6 months to hand-draw, custom illustrate, and then custom animate using Adobe Flash software. David Link, Creative Director and lead designer/developer on the project, said, “It’s really nice to be recognized for our hard work, especially in a community as talented as AAF.”

At the red carpet ceremony, 41 gold ADDY®s, 50 silver ADDY®s, three Special Judge’s Awards, a Mosaic Award, Best of Show and Best of Category awards were presented. Advertising students were also recognized with 17 gold ADDY®s, 19 silver ADDY®s, a Best of Show and Special Judges’ Awards. ADDY® 2010* also recognized professional excellence on the business side of the advertising industry with its Pinnacle Awards.

Mallery Mele leads the king cake cooking class

After the shop tour it was time to make our homemade king cakes. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Mele Printing bakes thousands of cookies each month for their clients. Many of their clients plan to receive their printing order on a Monday or a Wednesday so they’ll be sure to also receive a nice batch of fresh cookies. Anyway, each of us was given a log of dough with cinnamon rolled in the middle. We worked our dough in the form of a circle and threw it in the oven.

Once we took the cakes out of the oven, we dug out a few holes with our fingers on the bottom of the cakes to create a canal to insert fillings. I put strawberry and cream cheese in mine. Then, we flipped the cakes over and drenched them in hot icing and topped them with sugar. It was a masterpiece!

The event was an innovative way for Mele’s clients to learn more about their company all the while celebrating the rich history and culture of Southern Louisiana. We’re proud that Mele Printing is one of our vendors, and we look forward to fostering a long-term relationship with them!

Brian Rodriguez bakes his first Mardi Gras King Cake

The United Way selected 15 business professionals to participate in its new Donor Development Class. They were nominated by other business leaders and chosen because of their development expertise, community influence and desire to make a lasting change in Baton Rouge.

The top-performing member will receive a one-year honorary membership in the CAUW Tocqueville Society, a group of donors who give at the $10,000 level and above.

The class members are:

• Michael Adams, Scully Financial.
• Ian Dallimore, Lamar Advertising.
• Barbara Anne Eaton, Burns and Co. Realtors.
• Milton Hammer III, Lee Doughtery and Ferrara Investment Management.
• Ashley Keller, WBRZ.
• Kim Lambert, EMCO.
• Eric Lewis, Sable International.
• Natalie Noel, Help Solutions.
• Anthony O’Connor, Lee Michaels Fine Jewelry.
• Davis Prescott, Iberia Bank.
• Marshall Price, Regions Bank.
• Brian Rodriguez , GatorWorks Web Design.
• Cindy Stumpf, C.J. Brown.
• CT Taylor, AFLAC.
• Amy Underwood, Wright and Percy.

Advocate staff report. Published September 17, 2009 – Page 5B

Hunter Thompson and David Allain recently launched TigerBookMarket.com, a new Web site for Baton Rouge college students to sell and buy used textbooks.

“Basically, it’s an online textbook exchange [and] a price comparison service, too,” said Thompson, business administration senior. “We were tired of the whole process. There should always be a direct student exchange.”

TigerBookMarket.com is in “Craigslist” format and compares textbook prices with other online bookstores, such as Amazon, eBay, Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million. Thompson said the Web site does not compare prices with local bookstores like the Co-Op Bookstore or Chimes Textbook Exchange.

“We would love to get the Co-Op and CTX’s prices up on the Web site,” Thompson said in an e-mail to The Daily Reveille. “Right now, the larger online companies have data feeds that are already set up for an application such as ours. We would just need to work out some of the technical issues, and those companies would also have to be willing to do it.”

Thompson said their goal and initial mission is to make as much possible information about textbook prices available for students.

“We were fed up with … the difficulty of the whole bookstore scene in general,” said Allain, biology junior. “[With TigerBookMarket.com] you get a good deal for whoever’s buying [textbooks] and for whoever’s selling [textbooks]. Everybody wins.”

Allain said one of his biology textbooks cost about $150 at the University bookstore, but when he used the price comparison part of TigerBookMarket.com, he found the same book for $60 at another online bookstore.

Thompson and Allain worked with University alumni at Gatorworks Web Design to build and maintain the Web site.

“It was naturally a good fit,” he said. “I know what it’s like to have a new company, to be young and to get people to take you seriously.”

Rodriguez said Gatorworks has a maintenance contract with Thompson, where they are paid each month to update and change the Web site.

“The Web site costs about $150 a month to maintain because it requires a pretty large server,” Thompson said in the e-mail. “A domain runs for about $10 a year.”

In order to afford the costs of a new business as well as a new Web site, Thompson applied for a grant from the Louisiana Economic Development Office.

Rodriguez said LED paid Gatorworks approximately $8,000. He said the total project was close to $20,000.

“It’s not a get-rich-quick thing,” Thompson said. “It’s more for sustainability … to generate revenue from advertising to pay the server cost. We’re looking to do some advertising revenue, and maybe those companies [involved with the price comparison] will give us a small cut. [Any revenue] won’t come out of the student price.”

Jonte’ DePhillips, elementary education senior, said she thinks if all students use TigerBookMarket.com to buy and sell textbooks, the textbook companies will eventually lower their prices.

“[The textbook companies] know they’ve got us in a trap,” DePhillips said. “They can charge a ridiculous amount for books because they know we have to buy them … that’s why they’re so expensive.”

Thompson and Allain both said they did not create this Web site to make money.

“We don’t take any kind of commission from it,” Thompson said. “We thought it’d be a fun project. We’ll see [if local stores will be angered by TigerBookMarket.com]. I think local stores are convenient. I’m not trying to get back at them, just get more options for the students. I’d like to save a couple of hundred bucks, too.”

Reprinted from LSU’s “The Daily Reveille” on August 27, 2009 by Mary Walker Baus

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The original article is here.

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.