My latest project: Walter Ego

Some of you guys already knew, but only 2 weeks ago I finished my latest project: WALTER EGO.
Walter Ego is a Dutch rapper who happens to live in Nieuwpoort.

A few months back, Walter contacted me, and we started brainstorming about the new website. At some point he told me that I should make this website my masterpiece…

If you’d die now, this is what people should remember you for...

Well… At least expectations weren’t high, right?

A year ago I built the first edition of this website, which was pretty basic. Back then I used ColdFusion to build the administration panel. This time I built it using PHP.
I have to say that this project clearly improved my PHP skills. While I was building the backend, I was focusing on modular development, so I could reuse a lot of the written code. A lot of people suggested using the ZendFramework but since I’ve been looking into this a few times without making any progress, I just skipped that chapter (after all: we’re all bound by deadlines ) and went on developing my own framework (‘framework’ might be slightly exaggerating though).

I am pretty proud of the result, since everything I wanted to do, actually came through, and made it to the final result. While building this site, I really enjoyed seeing progress, and experimenting with the visual effects. I learned quite a lot during this project, which is really really cool! I even got to work with the Playr 2.0a class, only to realize it still needs a lot of work.

I even got to hack my way through the Youtube API and the Youtube AS2 SWF, to get a clean FLV file, which I then could easily stream to the video section of the site. That was pretty uncool. I never expected Youtube to return an AS2 SWF file. I expected an FLV file. Man, have I been wrong!
The main reason for Youtube to return a SWF is to embed all kind of extra features (such as captioning for example). And finally, Youtube not having an AS3 version of this made me want to start screaming.

All in all, this project was a fun project: I had many challenges to tackle, and in the end I delivered a quite unique product (at least, that’s what I like to think :p ).
Just 2 days ago, at midnight, Walter Ego released his first CD, which you can download freely from the site. If you understand Dutch, you might be interested in what this talented rapper has to say.
Download the CD here.

Some screenshots:

The video page streaming from Youtube

Administration Panel :: Guestbook section

Administration Panel :: Home section

Alternate HTML content for Google

Administration panel :: Pictures section

About page

URL: WalterEgo.be

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