Fuel, middleware, and 3 Dimensions
Since the begining of the year, my main focus with Traversi Media has been the development of a fuel quoting system. Targeted for wholesale fuel suppliers, the system provides a streamlined process for sending out custom daily price quotes for prospective and existing customers. While this is something that most competent accounting or ERP systems already do, it mostly required the recipient was an existing customer within the system. This FuelWRX module does not have that limitation and can provide the final price per gallon accounting for rack, freight, federal and local taxes, and margin. Once initial setup is done, daily price quotes are sent out with a single click after cost is updated.
FuelWRX is an evolving web-based platform that provides solutions for fuel marketers. In my time with a large commercial fuel company, I developed both end-to-end products and middleware products that helped streamline existing applications and processes. I see there's a need for these solutions with many other companies. While some may be able to afford to have their own custom solution developed, many others are looking for a more cost-effective alternative and I'm trying to build out the FuelWRX product to accomodate these customers. Different modules will solve different problems, so the system provides basic functionality for all with add-on modules offered for a monthly fee.
The quoting system was first suggested to me by a long time associate and grew to become something far more involved than originally intended or expected. Fortunately, I was expecting that. While it started out with one customer in mind, there was no way it could be built as a proprietary system with the kind of budget we were looking at. This would take hundreds of hours to do it right. This seemed like the exact situation for a FuelWRX module and off I went.
Early on, I knew taxes would be one of the ugliest parts of the application. Fuel taxes in California alone are dizzying in their complexity. I didn't want to be a tax expert and initially built the system so that customers, who typically have their own fuel tax expert on staff, could build out their tax profiles. So, I built a system that would allow for the building of tax profiles that could then be assigned to products and locations. I ended up building the same highly customizable functionality for all other cost components - so much so that I realized you could quote pretty much any product, in any industry, using the system (if I eliminated the fuel terminology).
With the completion of version 1, it became pretty obvious that while this could handle any tax situation, it really made things very complex for the customer. So, I bit the bullet and learned everything about fuel taxes in California and Nevada (our initial market) and built an automatic tax lookup based on site address. The fuel pricing system has completed internal testing and is ready for more extensive evaulation by potential customers. The market for this application is limited, but given some of the laborious processes these companies must go through to send out quotes, this could be a huge time saver.
FuelWRX continues to be a work in process, as well as a few Internet properties I have such as CardlockFuel.com. I'm something of a domain collector and buy domains that I feel I can do something with or have some value as an invesment. Given my extensive experience with cardlocks and developing processes and application supporting both card management and transactions, I'm developing cardlockfuel.com as something of a marketing platform for my company. The site runs on my own proprietary content management system (CMS), which has excellent search engine optimization characteristics. While I'm still working on building out the content, it's starting to get some good momentum on search engine traffic. Therefore, I'm carving out a little bit of time each week to build better and more useful content for a broader segment of visitors.
Finally, while high end 3D graphics and animation is not something most of my clientele will utilize, it has been a passion of mine for nearly 25 years. In fact, if it weren't for 3D, I would never have gotten into web development. I had learned to buiild my first website in 1994 to promote my art and as people discovered my site, asked if I could build them a website and it all just grew from there. Anyway, I had some time this month and worked on animating a car I had designed a number of years ago. I created a ten second animation of the car speeding through a warehouse, which tooks days to render the four different camera shots. I had hoped for a little longer animation, but the timing was crucial to really emphasize speed and the ten second blast with multiple camera angles was perfect.
I was going to post the animation as part of a longer video with some other newly rendered animations but it's pace doesn't really fit the others. So, I'm going to post on its own with some commentary on the car design, which I had designed a number of years ago. 3D renderings can be so realistic that some people don't always recognize that what they are seeing is 100% computer generated. While many artists recreate existing cars, I've always been a car guy and like to design my own cars. So, it migh be interesting for some to gain some insight as to how the car design came about and what I was striving for.
While COVID threw a wet blanket on a lot of business, things have been steadily ramping up and organizations are feeling more optimistic about launching new initiatives. If there's anything coming up for you that requires expertise in web development or design, please don't hesitate to reach out to me.
Website Development, DatabasesIntegrations, Graphic Design
