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  • PIE: The Solution to Everything

    written by: Alex Sivro February 01, 2012

    CSS3: it makes the lives of web designers easier and creates a lighter initial load footprint, right? In a perfect world, sure, but when web designers are still required to compensate for IE7 and IE9 not having much CSS3 support, these handy advances in web technology are quite neutered.

     

  • Derby Madness at Santa Anita

    written by: Mike Skeehan February 21, 2012

    Salted Stone is proud to have partnered with Santa Anita on the design and development of the "Derby Madness" fantasy horse racing web contest.

     

  • Abstracted JavaScript Form Validator

    written by: Stephen Yager November 15, 2011

    There are many JavaScript form validators available on the market, but we've only been able to locate validators that require you to hard code the names of the form or form elements. We've created one that can be extracted out for usage in any form.

     

Derby Madness at Santa Anita

Written by Mike Skeehan February 21, 2012

Salted Stone is proud to have partnered with Santa Anita on the design and development of the "Derby Madness" fantasy horse racing web contest.

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When Santa Anita approached us with the concept of an online contest based loosely on the wildly popular March Madness bracket competitions, we were excited to get involved. This would prove to be an innovative concept in the horse racing world -- 4 brackets of 8 horses, each seeded by a panel of experts according to historical and predicted performance.

Scoring is based on a combination of seed and actual race outcome in graded stakes races, culminating in the Santa Anita Derby on April 7, 2012.

We developed the application using a combination PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. The design team worked hard to provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface that is readily accessible across all browsers and devices. The registration UI provides important information on the horses including: trainer, sire and brief horse bios. The leaderboard populates dynamically based on the outcomes of the graded stakes races. A user's profile page shows his or her "stable" of horses alongside each horse's accrued points, as well as the aggregate stable totals.

While there are all sorts of bells and whistles that we plan to add before Derby Madness 2.0 is released next year, we're proud of the accomplishment and want to congratulate our friends & partners over at Santa Anita Park for their innovation, vision and execution.

You can sign up to play Derby Madness (and your chance at 4 Breeders' Cup tickets + a $2,000 "win" bet on the Breeders' Cup Classic) here. Also, we received acknowledgment for our role in the development in the press release announcing the launch of the contest.