Tonight, my friend Mel White and his son will compete in the 14th season of CBS’s reality show, The Amazing Race.  I’ve known Mel for eight years.  He is an author and gay rights activist.  His son is a movie writer whose credits include School of Rock and Nacho Libre.

From the teaser videos that CBS has released, there is a challenge where teams jump from the second highest bungee jump in the world. I thought it was Hoover Dam on first look.  I’m thinking I would not have done that even if they had guaranteed me the million dollars.  Life is too fragile and my spidey sense of danger is all-the-time tingling. And if they somehow convinced me to (only for a guaranteed million mind you), I’m confident the first officer in my brain would shout to my legs, “Ensign, belay that order!” all Star Trek style.

Anyways, Mel contracted me to overhaul his personal website. I designed the new layout, switched his website to my Backlit Content Management System, and integrated a Wordpress blog.  Backlit makes it easy for clients to edit webpages and upload photos.  I then recommend Ecto (or Live Writer if they’re on Windows) to manage their blog entries.  (However, in Mel and Mike’s case, teams cannot blog about anything related to the race while the show is ongoing due to their contract with CBS.)

Go team Mel & Mike!

Backlit is the Flex project I have been working on for several months.  It is the content management system that I am offering to distinguish my website hosting business from the typical shared hosting provider.   Backlit makes it easy to manage articles and photos.  It utilizes the XStandard plugin which generates clean XHTML strict code.  Photos can be uploaded, moved between albums, and deleted.

Here are some links that provide a lot more information:

1. Demo Site Backend (username: guest password: password)

2. Tutorials

3. Super Easy to Create a Frontend

4. More Information

The demo site completely resets itself every few hours, so feel free to give it a good test drive.