Jul 09 2009
Portfolio
parrysound.com
I built this news and community site from scratch in 2004, along with its simple yet robust content management system.
In each of the three years I was at the North Star, this site won Best Website awards from both the OCNA and the CCNA, the community newspaper associations for Ontario and Canada.
The site carried news from the two weekly editions of the newspaper, along with extensive community features such as a complete business directory, forums, galleries, historical and neighbourhood information, events listings and much more.
I built the RSS feeds and their accompanying XSLT stylesheets by hand.
The search function is a nicely-done multi-faceted approach that automatically searches through many different tables for information using MySQL fulltext indexing and query caching. It is fast and comprehensive.
All the images, PDFs and other multimedia for a new issue of the paper are uploaded in a single zip file, which the CMS unzips and sorts into appropriate folders. The CMS automatically creates thumbnails of each PDF to display in the PDF archives.
The CMS was designed to allow production personnel to quickly and easily upload a new issue of the paper with minimal hassle. It could be done in less than half an hour.
I built functions to translate the text coming in from Quark files into web-friendly characters. The entire site – every single page of tens of thousands of dynamically-generated pages – would validate as XHTML at the time I left the company. New administrators have since made changes that cause the site to fail validation tests.
torontoobserver.ca
Another news site, this time built on top of WordPress. I volunteered to put a news site together where Centennial College’s journalism students could post their stories. I did it in three days.
It’s pretty much a stock WordPress installation but I built a plug-in whch makes the horribly-broken gallery system in WordPress slightly more usable.
Most of the time on this project was spent writing a script to spider and parse thousands of HTML files from the old Observer site, allowing years of older stories to be saved and imported into the new site.
ookpics.com
One of my Centennial professors needed a website for his photography portfolio so I whipped this up for him.
It blends Gallery and WordPress together with a very simple design that makes his photographs the centre of attention.
It’s amazing what $200 and a couple of open-source CMSs can buy you.
sabrinastones.com
Look ma, no PHP.
They hired me to create some new pages for this existing site, so the design is inherited.
I used the Prototype javascript library to create some nice rollover effects in their gallery.
Lately, I’ve been using the jQuery library instead because I think it has a better design.
ideasincorporated.ca
This was a fun one. I hand-built a gallery system for this artist and storyboard illustrator.
I made extensive use of jQuery and an image slider script to custom-create a navigation system to the artist’s specs.
The whole site validates as valid XHTML.
And there’s a music gallery for good “measures”.
newsfix.ca
Myself and a couple of buddies from Centennial’s journalism program got together and hatched a plan. What if we could get fellow journalism students from Centennial and other J-schools to write content for a new Toronto news site that would focus on local Toronto events and geo-tagging?
We made it happen, and this is the result. It’s another news site based on WordPress, but this time I built some special plugins, hacked some others, and made extensive use of jQuery.
You can see the jQuery AJAX functionality mainly on the Superfeed page, where we pull in all kinds of RSS feeds from around the city, as well as Twitter feeds from Toronto politicians, and quarry them all in one place in chronological order. New items flash in at the top.
And then we pin some of the events on our map.
mymediabiz.com
This is a project I did for the fine folks at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications.
They bought an existing website built on ASP and MS SQL and I converted the data for use on PHP and MySQL.
I built a combined business and member directory as a WordPress plugin. Members can sign in and edit their own details, and if they represent a business, they can edit those details too.
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