Almost a year ago I became involved with a Web 2.0 startup called Fundfindr which aimed to be a social network of entrepreneurs, VCs and angels. Unfortunately, the market place became crowded and we've since switched focus to riiplay.tv, but Fundfindr is still growing of it's own accord and needs some touching up every now and then.
Not Current: I'm no longer involved with Fundfindr and can't speak as to the current state of the site.
Fundfindr is a social network with the goal of democratizing venture capital and is comprised of two sites: fundfindr.tv, a Wordpress blog with posts of interest to entrepreneurs, VCs and angels and fundfindr.com, a social networking site featuring company profiles, video pitches and a database of over 170 angel investors. My involvment with the Wordpress side of things is limited (I usually only step in when a new/updated plugin makes a mess of either the layout or the CSS), but I've played a major role in designing and developing many of the features available through fundfindr.com.
Original Website
I was brought on board shortly after Fundfindr purchased a PHP and Smarty based YouTube clone called Clipshare and my first task (after setting up and configuring the package) was to reskin the templates to match Fundfindr's colours and branding. During this time I also identified and fixed several possible SQL injection attack vectors and proactively closed several possible security holes within the script itself.
I also completely rewrote the video transcoding script to provide higher quality output at a more bandwidth concious bitrate and have also made several modifications to the video player itself, such as adding an automatically generated poster frame to conserve bandwidth on unwatched videos and reducing it's dependency on external configuration files which makes for easier embedding and quicker load times on third party websites.
Complete Redesign
Following a brief design competition, I was presented with the winning entrant's PSD mockup and completely redid most (if not all) of the site's Smarty templates to conform to stricter XHTML and CSS standards. The site renders in most major browsers (test with FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari) without any need for style hackery or additional browser-specific CSS includes.
I also created several sections of the site to provide functionality we required but Clipshare didn't provide, such as a more task-specific personal dashboard, the ability to attach expert reviews to a pitch and a streamlined more application-specific view video page.
The old video search and listing system was replaced with one extremely configurable SQL query which powers both the Find section of the website and the various RSS feeds by dynamically changing it's Smarty output templates based on how it's being visited.
Pitch-2-Web
Pitch-2-Web is one of the two custom paths I added to the existing upload system (the other being a method of importing FLVs hosted elsewhere) which allows users to record their video pitch live from their webcam directly into the fundfindr system. It's interface is simple and intuitive (the record button starts recording, the stop button stops and the play button reviews your video) and requires nothing more on the client end than a webcam and Adobe Flash.
The Flash application is written in ActionScript 3 and the video is recorded on the server side via the Red5 open source Flash server. Resulting FLVs are processed by the upload script and posted just like a video uploaded through more traditional means.
Web-built Newsletters
To keep in touch with it's members, I created a simple to use dynamic newsletter editor in a special administration area. Adding and deleting items is as easy as clicking a button and text is entered through the TinyMCE Javascript WYSIWYG editor. The newsletter editor also provides simple, anonymous metrics to see which newsletter links are generating the most interest and allows any number of videos in the system to be added to a "What's Hot?" sidebar displayed on the right hand site of the newsletter.
On the backend, newsletters are powered the Mailman mailing list manager and submitting posts is as easy as clicking a send button and prevents premature submission by requiring the user confirm the action. The backend also provides a facility to send posts to a test mailing list consisting of team members and the posts themselves are very well-behaved as they're sent as multipart/alternative e-mails containing with text/html and perfectly readable text/plain attachments.
What did you do?
To be honest, pretty much everything. I am the only developer on the fundfindr "payroll" and wear many hats, everything from system administration (Linux-based VPS running CentOS 4.5) to web development to Actionscript/PHP/Java development to SQL query crafting and optimizing. There are a few remaining vestiges of Clipshare, but for the most part fundfindr is a completely new animal.
Screenshots
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