Snow was flying by my vehicle as I drove to work during the 2015 snow storm and every school district had closed. I had just finished moving all of my school districts websites to our new platform a few weeks prior, during the Christmas break, which turned out to be a blessing and a curse.…
Author: Steve Burns
Snow Day Website Rescue
During a 2015 snowstorm, on a snow day, my school district’s brand new website crashed at 7:41 AM as thousands of parents tried to get updates, instead they nothing. Our vendor’s poor migration and theme conversion work left us with a poorly configured database server. Within one hour, I had the sites back online at…
The Pennant (Broadcasting)
The Pennant (Broadcasting) The Pennant wanted to be able to broadcast live audio of the sporting events that they covered and capture high quality photos. I led them in this process from the initial purchase of the equipment to the actual training and use. For ease of use and automatic archiving of broadcasts Google Hangouts…
News Websites and Broadcasting
The student newsgroups at Penn High School decided that they needed new websites and a new publishing platform. They had been on Drupal for years and wanted to use WordPress. (While Drupal does have it’s merits and I have developed websites and plugins for both WordPress and Drupal, it was too much for a student news…
Web Publishing Platform
While at Penn-Harris-Madison School corporation I developed a staff blogging platform that allowed any staff member to instantly create an easily customizable blog or website. For those interested I have created another similar version of this platform to be used in other companies. This platform is built on the WordPress CMS engine and uses the built in…
Revitalize Digital Signage
Revitalized outdated digital signage system using Ubuntu and the opensource software Xibo, to create a dynamic and up-to-date digital signage system that had more features than the original had. Including live weather updates, live twitter feed from school news crew, integrated google slideshow, and a much smoother and more user-friendly UI. This deployment enabled the…
30% Faster Maintenance and Deployments
I improved the server configuration and setup NIC teaming to increase the bandwidth by a factor of 4 and simultaneously increasing the number of machines we could image from 20 to over 50 while still seeing a 30% improvement in speed at the same time. This optimization streamlined deployments for thousands of devices, saving hundreds…
Led redesign for 15+ websites
Orchestrated redesign of 15+ websites for a large school district, managing vendors for theme migration from WordPress to Drupal, coordinating stakeholder input, and implementing features like responsive web design, LDAP integration, improved content management, and more user friendly admin interface. This involved change management, vendor management, and managing a wide variety of expectations and concerns…
Website Recovery
Parent company had a WordPress website that was not functioning due to a failed update after migrating the server. Other technicians had not handled such a problem. So I volunteered to help and had the website up and running in less than 4 hours despite not encountering that problem before and despite at that time…
Impossible data recovery
Customer bought in a Mac that had important family photos and tax documents on it. The mac would not boot and the Apple Genius bar told them it was “impossible” to recovery the data from the Mac. Customer bought it to me, then using a Live Boot Linux USB I pulled all of the desired…