After months in the making, the Swim Ltd website is now up and running. Swim Ltd is one of Ireland’s top providers of swimming courses and coaching. The site again utilises Google maps to show course venues and information and has a mySQL database and admin site to control what courses are available.

I was on my own for this project and did all the design and development work myself. I’ve never claimed to be a designer but the client is pleased with the overall look and usability.

I’ve finally uploaded the new version of my first commercial website - Knightsbridge Fireplaces. The client wanted to keep the look and add a few sections. I took the opportunity to re-structure the site and add a few features such as the javascript slideshow effect on the home page and the Lightbox style images throughout the site.

It also includes a cut-down version of the Google map mashup I developed for Puffbox.

I’ve just uploaded my updated website. It runs off Wordpress with a few modifications. I’ve written my own theme which is customisable so I can change the top image / colour scheme etc. if I get bored with it. It’s all dead easy to do and worth the work it took to set up.

Now I can offer fully content managed websites with customisable looks and relatively short development times. That sounds like pretty good news all round.

I’ve been looking at the multi-user version of Wordpress - Wordpressµ. The idea being that if blogging software can be used to create content-managed websites that don’t look like blogs, multi-user blogs should be able to allow for large scale content-managed sites. These sites could have many subsites (sub-blogs) with their own identities and management systems. Perfect for, say, a departmentalised organisation. Each department could have its own branding (logo, colour scheme etc.) as well as its own contributors and moderators.

Wordpressµ does this really well. I played around with it (even making my own theme - the look and feel which gets applied to each blog) and pretty soon had a skeleton site up and running on my PC which featured several subsites, each with the ability to customise the look and feel for that bit of the main site. I also created different levels of user from contributor level to super-admin.

Sky News have reported on the heavy rain across Britain and used our map mashup to show some of the worst hit areas. This particular application shows the polygon feature - they have highlighted an area south of Rotherham which could be affected if the Ulley Dam bursts.

This is a great example of a breaking news story shown to good effect on the Puffbox map application.

I’ve been working away at the Google Map mashup tool that I developed for Puffbox and have added some functionality to it. Editors were already able to add / edit / delete points on a map with custom markers and custom information windows as well as run multiple maps. Now I have added polygon functionality. This means that an editor can draw custom polygonal shapes and place them on the map (useful for highlighting certain areas). A map can have multiple polygons in a range of colours, with or without solid borders. Editors can switch the polygons on and off for the end user, change colours and even add or delete vertices on the polygons (i.e. give the shape more corners or take them away). All this is done by simply clicking on the map to create corners or clicking a corner marker to delete it. It works on Firefox, IE and Safari and can get an interactive map with points and areas highlighted up and running in a matter of minutes.

Well, it only took a day for our map mashup to get results - a murder suspect featured in the Sky News Crime Uncovered week website map has been apprehended. I don’t think we could have got a better start - our first project has been picked up by a large satellite TV network, been the subject of several journalism blogs and made the streets safer.

Today the Google map mashup I made with Puffbox went live with the start of the Sky News Crime Uncovered week. They’ve used it show Britain’s most wanted criminals. The really clever stuff is going on behind the scenes where journalists with no specific technical expertise can add items to the map using a WYSIWYG content management system we developed.

I’ve finished my first crack at AJAX programming (loading pages without having to load pages - sort of). It’s a calendar which uses PHP to work out which watch is on day shift in the NIFRS (Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service) and it works for every year from 2004 to 2020 (although this is easy changed). I’ve checked it on a few browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari) and it seems to work fine so now you Northern Irish firemen can see what years you have to work Christmas Day. It’s over on the Javascript + AJAX page.