Tag: php
The Christmas business I used to work out of offered a popular service where customers could visit earlier in the year and choose a still-growing tree in our plantations. The first year was messy with all of us struggling to find customer’s trees with crude paper forms and “best guess” locations, so I was asked to investigate using very cheap Android devices to geotag trees and ease the pain.
Continue reading “Android app to geotag Christmas trees”A quick look at another website build for Christmas tree wholesaler/retailer, Jadecliff.
Today we’re looking at the website for Marldon Christmas Trees for the 2014 festive season. It runs on WordPress with custom plugins to handle two booking forms and a customized letter from Santa designer which we’ve seen before.
Let’s dive in.
Long time no blog! I’ve been so busy at work recently I haven’t had any time to work on other stuff.
But today I have a little php nugget I had to put together recently that I think someone will find useful.
In the past I’ve dabbled with generating images dynamically in php – usually basic stuff, website statistics etc. But recently I had to do something a little more advanced in generating preview images of “Letters from Santa” that people would be paying for.
This involved placing a large amount of text within a series of template images – including ones with oddly shaped spaces the text would need to wrap around. I guess you could brute force it – manually position each line – but that’s frankly ludicrous and not future-friendly at all.
So, let’s make a solution.
Continue reading “Generating previews with imagettftext”Hello everybody.
Long time no blog, so here’s a quick catch up: I got a job at a small start up doing many varied and interesting things. The first project I was given built on my experiences with game development, and somewhat outstandingly I got to start writing a new game in Haxe NME! I can’t go in to details about the title right now, but it’s 99% complete and looking good.
One desired aspect of the game was an online leaderboard of some sort, so we can assign rewards to weekly/monthly winners. I’d never even looked at NMEs web function before, vaguely deciding I’d worry about highscores in Tower Defence “at some point”.
To my relief it’s super simple to use, and with a few php files on a server I’ve got a nice simple highscore system running.
Continue reading “Online highscore system for Haxe NME”Before the current Nerdshack, and before the previous Nerdshack, there was the original Nerdshack – the same site really, blog, portfolio and random drivel, but in a more designed shell.
I recently found this single screenshot of the old design and figured I’d publish it for posterity. I still like it – those boxy headline backgrounds were based on the window frames from the Watercolour theme in Windows Whistler (XP) builds 2410-2419, and the boxy layout of the sidebar complimented it nicely.
In the final iteration, the lower boxes on the sidebar contained links to recent blog posts, and clicking any link in to the blog triggered a smooth transition to the identically laid out but much darker design of the blog. I’m currently investigating building a similar theme for the current site – the grey is nice but it is a bit depressing after a while!
One of my first “real” programming projects from around 2006/7, in collaboration with some friends, to create a rough image hosting service for use on our own forums.
At the time our server had just moved to an “unlimited everything” plan, and we basically wanted to test it out, as well as the obvious benefits of hosting our own images.
I was the in-house developer, but I was only familiar with HTML, CSS, and a smidge of Javascript if required, so I didn’t have the chops to take on such a project. Luckily another forum member who I’ve since lost contact with was in to php, and so he began building code.
Eager not to be left out and eager to learn php I started pulling down his code and studying it to figure out how everything worked.
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”
I recently completed a short project for an old friend of mine, redesigning the website for his hosting company.
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”