A month or so ago I took toooldtoskate.com offline as it seems that it was being used as a spam relay. It was running an ancient unpatched version of wordpress, so this came as no surprise. I thought it would be a good opportunity to rebuild it using django. So yet another django blog engine has sprung into existence - all really simple stuff though, just a couple of models and some class-based generic views, a familiarisation exercise rather than an attempt to build a wordpress clone.

A work in progress, as ever..

To Do

• Commenting (i'll integrate disqus)
• Filtering by type/ channel (e.g. video and author)
• Merchandise (I will sell at least one mug, in 2012 I swear!)
• Blogroll/ links

Last night Dan Fairs pushed the latest version of the django powered Swoop Patagonia site live. The site has several new content management features created by Dan with the help of Ben Mason allowing swoop staff to create and manage content in a more flexible manner and has been re-skinned (by yours truly) to use a new design created by the talented designer Ming Cheung. Another successful team effort!

Last night the new version of the watershed website was pushed live. I had the pleasure of being one of many people involved in this project, which involved combining several different sites representing different projects within the watershed brand. I did the "first cut" of the HTML/CSS, working from a PSD provided by the design agency Document, and also helped with some of the Drupal theme integration, working alongside some talented watershed staff and other freelancers (i'd name them all here, but would inevitably miss someone).

The second phase of swoop travel has gone live - working again as part of Foundry, this django powered site got some new features and a bit of a makeover (by yours truly - i'm almost in danger of calling myself a web designer after this one!).

Earlier on this year I was fortunate enough to be asked to help the Aardman Digital team out on the companion website for the Tate Movie Project . This was one of the most fun and technically challenging website builds i've worked on. Working as part of the team, along with several other Bristol freelancers, I helped integrate the cakePHP site with wordpress and vanilla Forums. This was also one of the largest site builds i've worked on - multiple flash developers, PHP developers, designers, animators, front end developers and producers, all coordinated by subversion, unfuddle and the biggest wall of printed out screen grabs i've ever seen!

A couple of months ago, freelancers Dan Fairs, Dan Hilton and myself discussed the idea of teaming up to offer services beyond those that we could offer individually. We came up with the identity Foundry, and decided that we wanted to work on interesting projects, mainly using the Django framework.

No sooner had we come up with the idea, I was approached to build a website for new adventure travel company swoop travel, and I decided it would be an ideal project to work on as a collaboration. It has worked out really well and "phase one" of the site went live yesterday, providing information and filtered searches about trekking in patagonia, specifically trekking in the Torres del Paine national park.

This was my first Django project, and although all the heavy lifting was done by the two Dan's while I concentrated on the front end, it was a great introduction to working with the framework. One of the big wins was having the admin site in place very early on in the project allowing all the trip and operator information to be input as we built the site. It was also my first proper introduction to GIT source control, which worked out well for distributed collaborative working.

Looking forward to the next phase of this project and more collaborative projects!

I've started a new blog covering my experiments with mobile working - from working in cafe's and the garden to planned road trips. I'll be covering reviews of equipment and gadgets, techniques, experiences and places visited.

It's also a trial for a new offline blogging/CMS engine i've been working on (i'll write another post about that later - something I hope to release before the end of the year).

Have a looksie:-
Rick on the road - adventures of a wannabe nomadic web developer

Yesterday the www.timmytime.tv was was finally launched. I worked on this project along with the Aardman digital team building a bespoke php CMS and putting the site together to accommodate the mostly flash content with HTML alternative (where possible). XML was used to share the same data between flash and PHP, making it easier to maintain.

My web development career has taken another slight change in direction - i'll be working for the next few months over at Aardman Features helping with the development of a digital asset management system built by OTC productions in Los Angeles. It's an exciting project both because of the software and the fact i'll be closely involved in a feature film production - something I find fascinating. The first few weeks have been chaotic, but I don't think i've ever learned so much new stuff in a short space of time! I'm looking forward to learning much more over the coming weeks..

Last week I helped aardman digital set up the Wallace and Gromit site to cope with a huge traffic spike resulting from the 20th anniversary site relaunch and "google doodle" logo displayed on the google site across 12 countries. Working with the in-house team, I wrote a script to scrape the live site and create a static copy. The initial scrape was done using wget, and then a command line php script was used to run through the site doing some searching and replacing and renaming of various things. With thousands of pages of forum and user uploads the script took a while to run! The static site was then transferred to rack space cloud hosting which could be scaled on demand as the traffic spiked. Traffic to the main url was then diverted to the static copy of the site, based on the idea that most people would rather browse than interact. Anyone who wanted to log into the forum was then transferred to the live site.

This week we launched the new dshed.net - an "online showcase of creative work, commissions, talks, artist journals, festival diaries, research and archive projects" by the Watershed in Bristol. The site is Drupal 6 based, was designed by Tijuana Design, and built by myself and Oliver Humpage from the Watershed.

I was really chuffed to be asked to help the aardman online team out with the build of the new aardman.com site. I took the supplied photoshop designs and created HTML/CSS templates that were then handed over to be integrated into the CMS. I'm currently doing a lot of freelance work for digital agencies and I haven't been able to talk about the websites i've been working on, so it's great to be able to shout about this one!

One of the projects I have worked on recently is the Holistic Community website - a directory site for Therapists, Training Courses and Treatment rooms. This was an interesting project, as I was originally approached to make a few amends, but the previous developer refused to hand over the php code running the site, therefore the only option was to rebuild it, based on the existing site and a database export. I have to confess that I went about this project the wrong way - the database structure was far from ideal, and also I subcontracted the initial build to an apprentice who was learning php, who then left halfway through the project! As a result I had to rewrite all of the code.

In retrospect this would have been an ideal project to build on a framework or CMS, but this would have been too steep a learning curve for the apprentice. By trying to initially replicate the old site (including numerous multi-page forms), and using the existing database structure (resulting in lots of convulted multiple table joins), and using a novice php developer, and taking it on at a time when I was too busy with other projects, the project dragged on a bit and I probably did more than double the amount of work that I needed to - not ideal on a fixed-price project! However, the bright side is that it is a nice example of a rebuild/ reskin, and I am full of ideas about how I could undertake similar projects in the future in a much more efficient way.

I'm pleased to say i've achieved another of my 2009 goals, by launching the (unfinished) new version of one of my personal projects Too Old To Skate. The main site is now running php/codeigniter based sweetcron, which is used to pull content in from the original wordpress, flickr, delicious, twitter, vimeo and a friends blogger based site. I have plenty more planned for the site, but little to no time to do it, so I thought i'd upload the site unfinished in the meantime to allow myself to do incremental updates, rather than be embarrased by a holding page.

Amongst the plans are:-

• bring in the content (articles and photo galleries) from the now defunct plone(2) based DFR Skate zine - i'm thinking some sort of PHP/ codeigniter* front-end sucking in content (as XML/JSON or even plain HTML) from a Plone 3 site acting as a content server. Doing something like this with Plone has been on my mind for years! Maybe I should stick this in as a 2010 goal. Alternatively it may just end up as a skinned Plone 3 site on another subdomain - either would be good.
• Skin the blog to fit in with the main site.
• Other awesomeness - this is a non-commercial personal project and therefore my playground ;-)

*Having now played with both codeigniter and cakephp, I think I prefer cake. However as sweetcron is codeigniter based it would be plain silly to be using cake on the same project.

I'm part way to achieving one of my 2009 goals - i've got a commercial project live using cake php 1.2. The site is Kudos Business technologies - a company who specialising in LED lighting and other technologies aimed at lowering environmental impact and saving money.

The site has actually been refactored from a static HTML site, most of the pages are still static, but make use cake's routing, page templates, layouts and elements. The news section is dynamic, and was very simple to put together, but i'm only half way there - currently I haven't got any proper admin forms - that will have to be phase two! The learning curve so far has been very small - i'm looking forward to taking it a bit further.

Olivewood have recently launched a new drupal based site Green Infrastructure in the west of England.

This has actually been quietly live for a while now, but wanted to monitor how it coped with the fairly heavy load exerted by the AJAX based mapping tool, which bought our dev server to it's knees during original user testing, before being moved to a server with a bit more RAM.