Neil Pie

The Link

The project

I’ve had an ongoing relationship with Tim Matcham for a while now, having done a little maintenance here and there on The Garden Network over the past year. Tim approached me with a view to giving his site a bit of an overhaul, and wanted to incorporate his wordpress hosted blog at the same time.

With limitations imposed by his current hosting provider, Tim decided to move to my servers and asked me to organise the migration of his site and blog and to sugest possible ideas for a ‘freshen up’. After a brief discussion, we decided that the best course of action would be to hack around an existing theme to get it to look and function in the way we wanted. This gave a site that reflected Tim’s branding, but with minimal development costs.

The Geek Stuff

The site has been built using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS), and uses a modified version of the Cutline Wordpress Theme and various pre-built plugins including WP-sIFR. The WP export tool made bringing across all the blog posts, pages and comments an absolute breeze, until a bunch of folks decided to add more comments before I had a chance to go live. This meant trying to grab just a handful of comments from a sprawling XML file to import. Quite a pain – it would be nice to see some functionality added to the export tool in WP that allowed limitation my date or post type. All or Nothing can prove quite problematic at times. Still, we get by…

Safe.

The Link

The Project

The purpose of this site was simple, to provide an upcoming gig listing, a contact form, an MP3 player and links to the various social networking sites that the band are involved in. Expandability was key, with future plans to incorporate photo galleries and online sales to be kept in mind.

After stripping the content down to its bare essentials, I decided that anything other than a single page would be unnecessary. A sense of ‘web-site’ rather than ‘web-page’ was created by spreading the content across a large area and using an up/down auto-scrolling navigation.

The Flavours needed a site to reflect their DIY eithic, but one that also captured their individuality and irreverent sense of fun. The minimal use of colour and the use of ‘courier’ and hand-drawn fonts kept the site ‘lo-fi’, and the strong areas of black/white contrast create a striking visual effect, especially when flying past the screen on the auto-scroll.

The Geek Stuff

Site management needed to be kept as simple as possible for the guys, so the ‘random player’ (hats off to premiumbeat for the OS love) is based on a PHP script that picks a random mp3 file that has been uploaded into a perticular directory on the server, and then grabs all the other info necessary from the metatags of the file.

The gig guide reads from a spreadsheet uploaded to the same directory, and automatically wipes any listings that are in the past.

Obviously a big helping of JQuery and associated plugins, the detail of which I’ll go into at a later point.

Peace.

The Link

The project

I was approached by John (the Chippy!) of JTC Carpentry & Construction for a minimal website that would cement his online presence a little, to work alongside his Trust-a-trader profile and facebook pages.

John came up with the logo himself, from which the concept for the site design wasn’t too much of a giant leap.

Quite specifically after a minimal site design, all John wanted was the a page with some information about his company (that he could edit himself), a contact form and a gallery area, to which he could upload images with captions.

The Geek Stuff

The site has been built using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS), and my own WP configuration which will allow John to expand the site at a later date should he decide it is appropriate, and I’ve also made use of JQuery and a bunch of plugins, more details on those later…

I’ve based the WP theme around HTML5, but had to buckle a little bit to get the lightbox effect to work correctly, although with a little more attention I think this will run fine with the new HTML 5 block level element as opposed to the generic <div> containers. I’ve also implemented a little bit of PHP based browser sniffing to leave the Javascript off mobile devices, as the MopBox didn’t seem to translate so well to the smaller screen. That’s one for the to-do list right there.

Safe.

I’m currently developing a plugin that enables Wordpress administrators to share documents with subscribers, enabling individual access to specific documents on a library. If anybody is interested in participating in the testing phases then please feel free to get in touch.

A project very close to my heart, www.TheFlavours.co.uk is one of those proud ‘all my own work’ moments.

The simple design is based around a one-page format, incorporating a degradable fluid Javascript navigation system , a Flash music player, some PHP scripting to read song data directly from ID3 tags and a bespoke mini-CMS allowing the management of Gig listings and tunes available for the player.

Big up to the following resources used on this project:

• jQuery.LocalScroll & jQuery.ScrollTo Plugins
• Premium Beat MP3 Player
• getID3 Project
• Social Icons hand drawned
• PHP, MySQL & jQuery