Projects
Over the years I've worked on a few extra curricular projects that I, depending on the content matter, publish under Creative Commons rights.
Most are individual, private projects but some have been thought up within group and even professional situations. Either way I've developed them in my own time. Which is always quite hard when you've got a heavy daily work load. But often it only takes a few extra hours a day for a while to get something out there. Anyway, below is a list of all past, current and in-development projects.
South America Book
After spending 6 months in the stunning continent that is South America. Being the geeks we are, we decided to create a "coffee-table" book, comprising of all our blog posts and photos from our trip. The final product was a 11 x 13 inch full-colour hardback with 180+ pages. With layouts designed in Photoshop, then migrated to In Design for production, it took us the best part of two weeks to create and an on-going amount of time to proof and check.
South America Blog
For our trip to South America, I designed and built a simple blog site so we could post up all trials and tribulations throughout the trip. Acting as an update (and a "yes, we're ok") for our family and friends, and a record for us. The website became a labor of love and I ended up integrating my twitter feed (which I'd tweet to via my mobile), a Google Map mashup of our blog entries, Flickr feed and an email distribution system. So every time we posted a new article, our "avid" followers would receive an email containing the copy and image.
Tweet Quote
Intriguied with the idea of Twitter as social commentor, I thought I'd combine having a play with the Twitter Search API with creating a simple comment abstraction tool. The result was a plugin and site that were designed, built and launched in 48 hours. It's generated a reasnoable amount of attraction, with several personal sites and small businesses using the plugin on their site. To be honest, it's a plugin that probably has more legs than I've given it credit for. But the evil devil of time has restrained me from working on it any further.
- Tweet Quote project
Book Swapper
Frustrated with the lack of book swapping shops during our trip around South America. I began writing a small system that would enable travellers to exchange books without the need of middle-man bookshops or hostel bookshelfs. Still very much in-development (and under cloak-and-dagger) it's a main focus of mine for when I return to the UK and probably will be for a while.
PNG Fix
Born out of frustration more than anything else. PNG Fix was a solution to the numerous problems we had with pre-exisiting PNG fix solutions. Considering most of the sites I worked on at the time were using jQuery, I decided to write a fix that would build on the pre-existing funcitonality from the powerful plugin. It became an instant success at work, saving us hours of debugging time, and then, once launched on jQuery.com, it became a quick hit there. Attracting over 4000 downloaders a month.
jQuery PNG Fix project
Default Value
Another jQuery plugin born out of requirement. This is an extremely simple plugin, that populates any form field with a default value. That is then removed upon focus, and reinserted if no value has been entered when focus is lost. Simple, but very useful.
jQuery Default Value plugin
PHP Global Wrappers
These are just a couple of really simple PHP classes that I wrote a while back to aid the access of global variables, whilst reducing error rates and managing data flow. Written in the time of PHP 4, they're a little out-of-date with PHP 6 and somewhat less useable now. But back then, they were pretty helpful in the development of some medium scale CMS systems I built.
PHP Global Wrapper classes