Launched ColdFusion + Mura CMS Powered Site for Mitchell Swaback Charities

Every once in awhile, I'm fortunate enough to be involved in projects that truly "make a difference." This, for me, is one of those projects.

Mitchell Swaback Charities, formerly known as The Mitchell Swaback Foundation, launched their new web site at www.mitchellswabackcharities.org. Mitchell Swaback Charities was started in 2004 by family and friends of Mitchell Swaback after he suffered from a fatal accident on August 14, 2004. They wanted to continue Mitch's "compassion to serve in missions, the church and to honor God in the way Mitch did on a daily basis." For over five years now, they have been busy fulfilling their mission through a variety of projects and events that continue to impact people throughout the world.

The site is powered by Adobe® ColdFusion® and Microsoft® SQL Server with online content management provided via Mura CMS. I was able to fully integrate Jaci M.'s completely custom "bloggishy" design into Mura CMS without a hitch. I leveraged a number of class extensions and custom display objects in Mura CMS to pull everything together.

I was even able to pull in my cfMediaPlayer project from RIAForge to allow the client to upload and display video quickly and easily. Luckily, Amazon added streaming capabilities to CloudFront just in time for me to allow our client to stream their video as well.

Along with a typical "donate online" feature, the client had a few unique needs such as the ability to "flag" nearly any project as "supportable" which would then allow a visitor to direct their donation amount(s) towards that particular project. Other custom e-commerce applications included a "charity event participant sponsorship" application and a complete "golf outing sponsorship and registration" application.

I truly felt privileged to be a part of this project and hope that my work further enables MSC to continue thriving and growing in their mission to "Advance the Kingdom of Christ by Reaching Out to Others." Congratulations and thank you to everyone at Mitchell Swaback Charities.

Mitchell Swaback Charities
Designer: Jaci M. | Developer: Stephen Withington | Content Management System: Mura CMS

Amazon Web Services Adds Streaming to CloudFront

In an announcement by Amazon Web Services (AWS) today, Amazon CloudFront now has the ability to stream audio and video files. The best part is that there are "no additional charges for streaming with Amazon CloudFront; you simply pay normal rates for the data that you transfer using the service."

For me personally, I had to partner with third-parties to allow my clients the ability to stream audio and/or video and trust me, it wasn't cheap. Granted, many of the companies that currently provide this service offer "value-added" products and services, but still, it wasn't exactly affordable for many of our smaller clients.

Thank you Amazon!

Amazon Web Services Slashes S3 Storage Pricing and More

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced huge pricing reductions in their popular S3 storage plans today. In addition, they're offering "Free Inbound Data Transfer" until June 30, 2010 which includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Simple Queue Service, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Read the full announcement at http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/08/aws-announces-pricing-changes/.

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