‘neil’ + ‘@’ + ’shortdark’ + ‘.’ + ‘net’

Link: http://www.agataalexander.com/

I helped movie editor and director, Agata Alexander, on her portfolio website. It is a very simple, yet stylish page where the main feature is a short reel that displays her skills with short segments of her work.

The site is just a single page but it was a very fun project to work on and Agata’s work is very enjoyable to watch.

Agata has worked on music videos, commercials, multimedia features for magazines and other movies. Her work is very diverse and always of a high quality. The reel showcases her abilities and has her contact info at the bottom.

Link: http://www.jpguploader.com/

We used to have a site (uploader.net) where people could sign-up and upload whatever pictures they wanted. It started off as a pretty simple ASP website then grew into a network of similar PHP sites. The main site was purely an upload facility with a gallery that was searchable and categorizable. Each user could login and edit their uploads and make up to a certain number of uploads per day. The images were displayed in HTML pages and we developed a way of displaying the images in the page so that it should not be possible to hotlink them.

Other smaller uploader sites were a “scaled” uploader (scaled.uploader.net) where you could crop, scale and distort your JPEG and a facility to create your own webpage by filling ion an HTML form.

All of these sites were originally developed between 2002 and 2003 and were the experimental arm of Shortdark. The main image uploader where both JPEGs and GIFs could be uploaded to the galleries had around 4,000 users and at the time we stopped accepting uploads over 10,000 uploads had been made.

As you can see, the diversity of uploads was vast. Anything from photos of pets, cars and groups of friends, to computer screenshots, celebrity photos, scanned drawings, 3D models and pictures that people had made on their computers.

Today, there are many different free uploading services so the need for this kind of website is not as great but we have started to make an archive of some of the images that were uploaded. We’ve started off as JPEGs only. The gallery system is similar but the coding is much improved from the 2002 code and improvements will be made to the “look” and functionality of the site in due course.

Link: http://www.pictureyourcanvas.com/

Unfinished.

I created a dynamic gallery and upload system that links to a paypal shopping cart.

The purpose of the site is twofold. The surfer can sell canvases of existing pictures in various sizes and with various frames and also upload his/her own JPEG so that the printers can make them their own canvas and frame of the dimensions they choose with their own photo in it.

The site basically works and just needs extra content on the information pages and some finishing touches.

Cards by Gilly

We developed this site to be a platform for Gilly to sell her handmade greeting cards.

The look of the site is based around a skin for a Wordpress blog that has been modified so that the whole site looks very similar even though there are different “engines” involved in the back-end of the different sections.

One of the cool features is a dynamic RSS feed that makes it really easy for the menus to all be in sync without calling the database every time.

If Gilly has a card that she can remake it can be added to the store, otherwise “one offs” can be added to the “Unique” section.

The store uses the basic Paypal shopping cart, not Paypal Pro.

AI Arch

I worked on this site while I was living in Los Angeles in 2005. Bernardo Charca is an architect in the Venice / Marina Del Rey area of the LA Metropolis, he’s worked on a lot of successful projects including the Atlanta Olympics.

The site is a very simple HTML-only website but certain pages were in a mess and very hard to update due to a jungle of computer-generated tables created by a program such as frontpage or dreamweaver. I worked on updating the portfolio pages of his site and tamed the tables so that Bernardo or a webmaster could update it more easily in future.

I also created javascript rollovers.

Lowtech

I worked with James, the hands-on supremo of Lowtech on designing and developing a new website for the various brands of Lowtech.

At the time they had from 2 sites (lowtech.org and rti.org) one representing their workshop location and the other representing their recyling and techno artistry. James wanted to create 4 distinct parts to his business: learning, recycling, art and getting involved. These became the 4 parts of Lowtech.org!

I created a simple design and modified some PHP that I had used for another site to make a file-based storage system for the lists of links on some of the pages like the access spacers page and this list of events.

While the PHP application has been modified and added to since then I created a system that allowed them to not only add and remove links in the list and edit list items, but also rearrange the order of the list. Each entry was a text file that had a certain number of lines, each line represented what would be a different column in a database. I loved working on this project because it was one of my first contracts as a freelance developer for a professional business.

Some of my projects have been lost or redeveloped over the years but so far this one is pretty close to how I left it which makes me very proud.

22nd July 2001

neil.lowtech.org

One of my first websites. I made this at the same time that I did some voluntary work with Access Space in Sheffield. I went with the simple plain background and colourful square boxes for the front page. Simple but effective. Sums up the Shortdark philosophy.

This site contains some information on web technologies plus an old “Flash History” that show cases some of the Flash experiments and tools I’ve made. See also Shortdark Flash.

Audiolaceration

This was one of my first websites and I believe it was my first job for a client. The site uses HTML and javascript with frames and the layout was designed by me.

I originally created the site as a static HTML website then, later in 2001, converted several of the pages to PHP so that they could be updated by the clients using a HTML form. I also added a PHP/javascript counter that was my first attempt at using the PHP gd library. The mechanism for the admin area and PHP updating was used on later sites and I used the gd library in a similar way in my PHP jpg uploader in 2002 and 2003.

Considering that this was one of my first websites the coding it very neat. I’d make the site differently now but there are some nice touches like the icon. It looks the same on most browsers, which is always nice!