I’ve done a few interesting sites as of late - - some of them very challenging, indeed.

Bill Wyatt, of Martinsville, VA - owns a few media outlets in the state of Virginia. He is the newest member to our Blogs About community

Martinsvile Media is his on line news portal. What we did with this was develop the design - and then instead of regular posts to his front index page - it pulls in the last 5 posts that have been made to his three other blogs that compromise his media empire down in Martinsville, VA. Anytime he posts to either of those three sites - the title, a link and a snippet of those posts are immediately posted to his front page portal at MartinsvilleMedia.com

Martinsville Daily is their newspaper site where Bill provides his readers with local, regional, national and international news. Most of the information here is local to Martinsville - however, there are, at times, other news stories of interest to everyone.

WHEE Radio am 1370 is their local radio station that is comprised mostly of talk radio and news to the listeners of the Martinsville local area. Bill has a live web cast located there, as well - so listeners can login to listen - and also view a streaming video feed of the control room. I think WHEERadio.com has yet to resolve - but he does have a redirect up to the temp. URL.

WYAT40 is their television station. This is also local to the Martinsville, VA area and broadcasts news and local interest broadcasts. All four of these sites compromise the local Martinsville, VA media efforts all run by one mastermind, Bill Wyatt.

To pull it all together, Bill also had us install and design his discussion forum. He had the forums running on his old server - before he moved all of his sites to Blogs About - and he was running ASP Playground on a windows server. Since he was moving to our server - which is a Linux environment - and ASP only runs on a windows server, we needed to find a solution for him. Personally, we like VBulliten as a forum discussion platform - and having recently changed our hosting support forum from phpBB to VBulliten - we talked it over with Bill, and he was in agreement and gave us the GO!

One problem arose, however - - VBulliten did not have a converter for ASP Playground. And ASP Playground ran on a SQL server — VBulliten runs on MYSQL . . just enough of a difference to give a person a headache. Not to be deterred in finding a solution - - my tech God, Chris came up with a solution and and worked with one of the developers at VBulliten in converting the database and writing an import script. He first had to convert the database - and then import all of Bills threads and data from his ASP Playground environment into VBulliten.

It’s been a two week long project, and Bill has been incredibly patient and helpful in the process . . and now it is completed. Even if you’re not from Martinsville, VA - - these are some of the nicest people you ever want to meet. Go over and visit - say hi from me!

My next challenge was designing a site for an Internet Satellite company in the Netherlands. Not a big deal - except it had to be done in Dutch. And I can do a lot of things - - but speaking Dutch ain’t one of ‘em! I’m always learning new stuff in this business!

Jarco from Satplaza.com was incredibly helpful with the translations, however - and worked with me to translate the data from English over to Dutch. Now that I’ve finished with it - I know a few words in Dutch, to boot! Certainly not enough to converse, by any means - but at the very least I know what some of the basic elements of his site say!