BPMpathway provides remote sensors for post operative patients to manage their care for pain, range and quality of motion and physiotherapy care. When BPMpathway contacted Lillibolero, they needed key infrastructure brought up to date without loss of service for the patients depending on them. We were happy to oblige and by using rolling updates Lillibolero managed to bring their servers up to date without service outages for their users.
When your job is to expose Chinese corporations trading on the US market that are not what they seem to be, you’re bound to make some enemies. As portrayed in the documentary The China Hustle , after publishing due diligence reports on several popular Chinese businesses that showed the companies in question could not possibly be experiencing the growth they were claiming in their SEC filings and the “China Miracle” to be a little too miraculous, that’s exactly the position that Wolfpack Research founder Dan David found himself in. The company’s website found itself to be the target of DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks that appeared to have an origin in China. After reviewing Wolfpack’s requirements for security in the face of traffic spikes from hackers and the need to disseminate their research quickly to a global audience, a rebuild of their site using modern serverless technologies seemed like the best bet. Lillibolero’s framework of choice for static sites is the Hugo static site generator, both for it’s speed in rendering the final HTML site and for its maturity and ecosystem.
Women’s fashion for formal gowns is not a world that Lillibolero is particularly familiar with, but when the International Prom Association asked us to help them migrate their site to AWS, we were happy to oblige. Their site was limping along, trying to serve an enormous number of images through a single Wordpress install on shared hosting. Lillibolero moved their site to a budget friendly AWS Lightsail instance, and moved their gigabytes of graphic content to be served from an AWS S3 bucket. All of this was placed behind the content delivery network at Cloudflare. The effect was to take most of the load off the Wordpress server, so that even at peak traffic it could still handle all the requests that came in. This is one of the main benefits of using a CDN like Cloudflare. It can cache static resources produced by the main Wordpress origin server so that every request does not have to be handled by Wordpress. Having the image content served from S3 helps tremendously as well. Now the site can happily chug along with most of its load and storage being served by the low cost and highly available AWS S3.
Not everything about a website is visible on the page. This was a small project Lillibolero got involved in through Amazon’s AWS IQ program which pairs clients with AWS Certified professionals like myself. The design was fine, the hosting was fine, everything was fine except the site would not display. A bit of investigation uncovered a misconfiguration in Route 53 AWS’s DNS service. Which illustrates the point that a website is more than just what you see on the screen. Many different services come into play - web servers, DNS servers, databases, the complexities of a content delivery network, all of which must function properly to deliver your content to your website’s visitors. Which is why it’s important that your developer understand the entire chain of services involved, not just how to develop artistic content.
The International Conference on Men’s Issues is a worldwide conference of the men’s rights movement. In 2019 it was hosted by the Honey Badger Brigade in Chicago. It was a fun project and my first Hugo static website. I found Hugo easy to use and easy to add content to, so much so that I’ve added it to Lillibolero’s standard toolset for web development, and redeveloped this website you are reading now in it.
I rewrote the backend Python code to manage the transfer and testing of uploaded 3rd party titles. We needed to transfer rather large data sets around the world, dependent on which markets the title was being released in, etc. .
PrayerNook.com was a Christian social site where people of faith could send and receive prayers from their prayer partners. Because of the social functionality it was built on Liferay Portal CE, with custom portlets built in Vaadin.
Tahoe Social was a startup to create a social search engine for the Lake Tahoe Basin, including South Lake Tahoe, Truckee, Kings Beach, Tahoma, Tahoe Pines, Tahoe City, Incline Beach, Glenbrook, and Stateline. The goal was to create a ‘one stop shop’ for everything a visitor to the area might want to know including business pages and reviews, travel information and arrangements to hiking and recreation guides. Smaller micro-sites within the main site were developed for each community, and local businesses could claim their own set of advertising pages.
This was a real estate listing site of commercial property available in the Cottage Grove area that was built in tandem with the Growing the Grove website.
This was a website commissioned by a partnership between the City of Cottage Grove, the Cottage Grove Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Economic & Business Improvement District with the purpose of attracting businesses to the Cottage Grove area. Our friends at Kizmetech did most of the design work while Lillibolero did the back end .
Bohemia Mining Days is our local summer festival, celebrating the gold rush era that founded towns like Cottage Grove, Oregon. Their website was a sad thing, and Lillibolero along with Kizmetech built them a nice little Wordpress site to commemorate the State of Oregon’s 150th anniversary. It included event guides, maps, forms for vendors and those who wished to participate in the parade, all the usual festival sort of stuff. BMD is a great festival, and was great to work with!
MyLivingDays.com was a Liferay 6.0 portal based baby boomer lifestyle site. This project required custom Java and Groovy portlets and Lillibolero oversaw development for J2EE based Liferay portal mylivingdays.com .
Manufacturing Solutions Innovation is a company that specializes in actuators and drive motors manufactured in China. They needed a B2B site to display their current line actuators as well as advertise their custom manufacturing services. B2B websites present an entirely different challenge. The division between “show” and “go”, between looks and functionality, often ends up favoring the functionality side. We went with Joomla, a popular CMS with a WYSIWYG backend that allows non-developers to add content.
Our original site, built on Plone. I had built applications on Zope 2 and enjoyed the pythonic flavor of it so I thought to try out the CMS built on top of it. I guess you would have to say that ZODB was the first NOSQL database I had used, and I could see the attraction.
With the help of LightWeb Design, Lillibolero rebuilt the South Lane Fire and Rescue website with Joomla CMS as part of a community outreach project. Besides the public facing website, the project included an internal staff portal for training schedules, etc. .
In 2005 our small rural library needed help. They had a bank of Windows based public Internet terminals where you could see all the latest trends in malware and porn, if you could get the public machines to boot at all, and a website from the mid 90’s . Since this was a volunteer project and money and time for ongoing support was hard to come by, Lillibolero flushed those old Windows installs, removed the hard drives from the desktop terminals and built a Linux Terminal Server Project install. Network infrastructure had to be built or configured first, but for surprisingly little money we got 10 public terminals up and running that have over the years 2005-2015 logged around 25000 logins annually, with very little downtime.
Lavender Field Embroidery was the first website Lillibolero built when the company was formed. It didn’t turn out that bad, considering how convoluted the Joomla development process was at the time.
It was built on Joomla and was one of the first sites Lillibolero built. Joomla can be somewhat hard to maintain, or at least this version was. For a straight forward business site Wordpress, even with it’s limitation, is easier for the average user.
