SteveMcKeogh.co.uk - Web Developer

Swarovski wanted a microsite for their popular event Fashion Rocks, which was hosted in Monte Carlo, on October 17th 2005.

They initially said this would be a microsite connected to www.swarovskispakles.com, and to start with it was a microsite. But it then grew and grew and is now nearly as big as swarovskisparkles.com.

Fortunately there wasn't much functionality involved with this microsite which meant there was no CMS. The most functional area of the site was the "For the Press" section.

This area is a password protected area containing all high resolution images from the event. Seeing the event ended (officially) late one Sunday evening, there would be no one around to crop and upload the images, so what we created was a script that would resize and optimise the images on the fly.

Basically how this worked was, we gave the photographer at the event login details to an FTP account on the site where he could upload all the images he had taken at the event. Then our script would run every 5 minutes from midnight for 4 hours, grabbing all images in there and resizing and optimising them. Then all optimised image would then be automatically pulled out on the site.

This was quite risky as there would be no one around at that time, so if it failed for some reason no one would have been around to fix, fortunately it run successfully... obviously :-)

The rest of the site is pretty much static. But all pages have a neat flash slideshow which is all controlled by xml, so it's dynamic and doesn't require any alterations to the flash for updates.