PNP: Political News Page

The Political News Page collects a whole bunch of leftist news feeds on one page (updated hourly).
Instead of having to search the net to find the latest news, you only have to look to one source!

Calculator for E-Estimator

My work for Reed Construction Data (an extension of the ‘Estimator’ product) allows builders to easily quote prices for house construction and other building construction.

The Estimator program adds together every element of the construction process from roofs and girders to labour.

The calculator extension which I completed along with the functional specification (20 pages) allows for progressive addition or substitution of calculations.

This tool is behind a firewall and only accessible to Reed Construction Data clients.

The calculator was written in PHP, HTML and JavaScript.

JSON 2 HTML

From the JSON home page:
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.

JSON 2 HTML allows you to instantly view a string of JSON text as a set of nested boxes, corresponding to the objects, arrays and values in the JSON string. You can even have the page get the JSON string from a URL and automatically parse and display the string.

A link to this page is included in the home page for JSON, which was established to promote the JSON format.

JSON 2 HTML is written entirely in HTML and JavaScript, except for one php script which simply proxies requests to 3rd-party servers.

JSON 2 HTML has received more than 80,000 hits since March 2008.

KeyControl

KeyControl is a game for the Apple Dashboard that tests your typing ability and reaction time. The quicker you react to changes on the screen, the more you score. And as you play, the game gets harder – you have to react faster and faster to beat the computer. Your scores are automatically submited to this web site, so you can compare scores with other players. Warning: KeyControl is addictive!

Katalyst

I have developed a number of sites at Katalyst Web Design, including:

All of these sites were developed in Ruby on Rails.

Katalyst Web Design are recent finalists of the Australian Graphic Design Association National Awards (2008) and Bronze Medallists in the Adelaide Art Director Club Awards (2007). Bronze Medal was the highest result gained for Web Design.

FileBot

I replaced the table-based design CSS & XHTML, replaced JavaScript rollover buttons and curvy corners with CSS.

Brenton Fletcher's Portfolio

My new portfolio allows easy editing of my works using a web-based interface, and aids categorization of my works using a tag cloud interface. There were two main issues with my old portfolio:

• A work could only be in one category at a time; so for example, a widget that allowed you to play a game could only be in ‘widgets’ or ‘games’, but not both. The new tag cloud system solves this by allowing each work to have multiple tags – so that widget can now appear under both the ‘fun_&_games’ tag and the ‘widget’ tag.
• It was difficult to add a new work; this meant opening a PHP script in a text editor, manually adding the HTML to describe the work, opening up an FTP program, uploading the PHP script, and checking the results in a browser. The new version allows me to add & edit works directly from my browser – and the body text of each work uses the Textile markup language to lessen the amount of HTML that needs to be written.

AtlanticDVD

AtlanticDVD is one of the premier DVD rental companies in Australia, and their online store serves thousands of customers a month. In only 4 months, as Senior Developer & System Amin for Katalyst Web Design, I have created most of the code behind the new version of AtlanticDVD’s online store including full product management, checkout (with complex postage and insurance algorithms), order fulfillment (involving multiple shipments per order with varying postage and insurance costs).

The new site is implemented in Ruby on Rails, a programming language and framework I mastered on the job. This system will easily scale – which is a requirement of this, one of the largest Ruby on Rails deployments in Australia.

RSS 2 HTML

RSS 2 HTML allows you to embed RSS ‘feeds’ into your web pages in only a few minutes. Just copy the URL for the RSS feed into my page, then click ‘submit’ and my page will spit out the right HTML to copy into your web page, resulting in feeds on your web page.

You can even style the feeds with CSS.

RSS 2 HTML is implemented in PHP, with the front end implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

A recent search of pages using my rss2html feed script show it embedded in the following sites:
http://needsofthemany.blogono.com/
Needs of the Many is an American political blog.
http://e-selides.gr E-Selides is a Greek education resources web site.

These sites using my feed generator have generated more than 2,500,000 hits to my site since March 2008!

Australian Network for Art & Technology

From the website:

ANAT is Australia’s leading cultural organisation working at the intersection of art, science & technology; networked & emergent art practices; experimental music & sound arts; and mobile & portable platforms.


As a Katalyst project, I completed the back-end coding for the new ANAT website using Ruby on Rails, which launched 1st May, 2008.