Portfolio

UK Ability Magazine

The sister company of the web design company I work for runs a couple of disability-related websites and also used to run a print magazine. It was decided that the magazine would go online and so I was asked to design the website. An XHTML template was created and used together with the WordPress online publishing tool to create an online magazine that has rolling content like a blog, rather than delinieated issues, while keeping full magazine quality (and length) articles. UK Ability Magazine was launched upon the world at the end of September 2005 and is the first phase of a re-working of all of Ability Media's websites.

Infinisys/SiteAdmin

SiteAdmin content management system interface. SiteAdmin is the backend management interface to my Infinisys content management system, developed in PHP with a MySQL database. I've used it mainly to manage the couple of large computer game websites I run, as well as a couple of smaller personal sites. It hasn't been made publically available yet, but if you're interested, get in touch :)

North East Forestry Portal

The North East Forestry Portal is a complete site design and development project I did while working for The Creative Cake.

Aside from designing the site, I developed a PHP/MySQL back-end to the site to handle content management, including business and service directories as well as a private image gallery for partners of the project. The site also has dynamically-loaded weather information from an XML feed, updated once and hour.

InfinityBoard

The first version of InfinityBoard was developed out of a personal desire to have a forum/messageboard software that worked properly at a time when most available software that didn't cost huge amounts was using flat-file databases and had a tendancy to cause problems such as randomly deleting posts.

With version 2.0 I released the software commercially and got a good response from customers. IB3 improved hugely on the first two versions but lack of time to dedicate to the project meant I slowly had to ramp it down and put it on hold for a while once all customer contracts were fulfilled. IB4 is in the pipeline, but with having a full-time development job since graduating, it's unfortunaely coming along slowly.

chaosleague|players

After having worked as a developer on the PC game Breed, I got pointed at a game published by the new British publisher Digital Jesters (founded by a bunch of the guys from the former UK office of Breed's publisher, CDV), Chaos League. The game looked great fun (American football with Ogres, a la Bloodbowl) and after playing a beta copy and speaking with the developers, Cyanide, I decided to start up a community site for the game.

chaosleague|players was born, following in the tradition of Haloplayers and Breedplayers (spot the theme?). The site was hugely popular and by the time Cyanide were releasing public betas of the game's expansion pack, Sudden Death, CLP was handed exclusive rights to provide the beta for download in the UK.

Thanks to a good relationship with the game's developers, the site also has a sub-site running and automating online leagues (see below)

leagues.clp

With the release of the original Chaos League, it was clear there would be a number of online leagues starting up that would require a lot of management, so I decided to develop a system to automate many of the tasks of a league administrator. The system handled uploading and downloading of team files, replays and match reports, with the system able to parse the match report files and save them for display on the site in a more friendly format than a .csv file.

With the announcement of an expansion pack for the game, I decided it was a good time to re-work the system and improve it some more. Thanks to the work of a couple of other fans and talks with the developers, it was now possible to read the game's database files and get much more information from the game. In the new system, players can upload their teams and the system will read them and pull out all the information you could ever need, including team rosters, player skills and other information.