Category: Programming
Items about code of all sorts, including php, Java, Javascript, Haxe, Perl, and many more.
In 2008/9 I visited a bar near where I lived called The Indie Lounge frequently. Friendly staff, live music and cheap drinks beckoned me in, but after a while I began work on an altogether more professional project with them – creating a website.
There was some interest in having an online presence which could be customized and styled, unlike the bars most prevalent means of communication at the time, Facebook. So I went and built a design I felt reflected the bar, grungy and dark. From there, things got a little strange…
Continue reading “The Indie Lounge website”
Pong was a short project attempting to clean up my code base for Pinball, as well as rectify several nasty and hard-to-catch bugs who were only really present because Pinball was based directly on the first Haxe code I’d written which as you can guess, wasn’t totally solid. Eventually the need to rewrite a lot of my core code is what made me cease development on Pinball, although Pong did help resolve several issues. It was also built while Atari was running it’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge, so I wanted to experiment with some alternate game modes, hence the strange selection of gametypes on offer (multiball is still my favourite).
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Pinball was my first real project with NME, and influenced everything I’m doing with it now. It was very much an experimental project to gain understanding of how it all worked, and in retrospect, I wrote a lot of very heavy, slow code that was unnecessary.
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In the final year of my degree course we had to design and implement a project entirely of our own choosing – some made iOS apps, some made travel/mapping aids, all manner of things. I was personally quite stuck on what I wanted to do – it’s difficult to decide what you want the biggest project you’ve built thus far to be, especially given the choice of potentially doing something easier and getting it done sooner. I began looking through the personal pages of every lecturer who was available as a project overseer, and came across the suggestion of trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. At first I skipped over it because when I thought about how I’d implement it, my brain returned a big fat null.
Ultimately, that’s the very reason I chose it. “No point in half measures,” I thought, so I jumped in to the deep end of a project with no clue how I was going to make it happen.
I recently completed a short project for an old friend of mine, redesigning the website for his hosting company. While it doesn’t contain any complex elements, I had to implement a basic php page loader as well as the theme and some simple Javascript for the drop down menu. Having produced this self-contained site, I then had to dive in and apply the same theme to his customer-facing management console, WHMCS, and design and implement a similar theme to an installation of Invision Power Board. All told this was a neat little project, and I think the result’s solid. Check it out over at Liquidplex.net, or see one more short of the IP.Board theme after the break.
Continue reading “Liquidplex website”
As a teenager I was very active on technology discussion forums, and became the in-house developer for several. Modifying themes for Invision Power Board (now IP.Board), and tweaks to any external web sites or front pages were my general jobs, although I did make a few skins from scratch way back when.
The largest project I ever undertook was for a large community of over 30,000 members – the site had previously had a web site front end linked to their forum, but lost it during some upgrades. I created a new portal for them which linked in to their forums and displayed the top news posts, as well as most recent posts across the whole board, popular downloads, and a custom poll widget. I also created an extensive admin panel allowing admins to control exactly which forums the top/most recent posts were drawn from and set the poll.
Continue reading “IP.Board Portal”
Today I want to briefly talk about a cancelled project from around the time I finished University. Myself and a friend began building a game for this new platform called Windows Phone.
Continue reading “Canned WP7 RTS game”
While working for a small local building company in 2008 as a general office run around and telephone answer-er, I was experimenting with basic ideas for a website for the company. At the time their web presence was little more than a small magazine-style ad on a local business page, and that seemed unnecessary.
No fancy php here, just a basic design/layout prototype and a little Javascript for the larger image popups. I present screenshots both from my initial prototyping and a later revision with “real” content and layout.
Incidentally, the company does now have it’s own website, which isn’t that dissimilar in appearance and scope. Four more images after the break.
Continue reading “Building company site design”