Likemind portfolio

The Sustain-a-what?!?! application is a quiz intended to amuse while making the user think about the issues surrounding the hot topic of sustainability.

The quiz runs on the Drupal platform so the client can maintain its content for themselves. I wrote a custom module to manage the quiz questions and answers, as well as storing the results and displaying them for users taking the quiz.

Developed for twelfth man and their client synnwyr busnes.

The Daily Goss is an online celebrity gossip magazine. They asked me to create a Facebook application that would display the latest headlines from their RSS feed.

The application consists of a canvas page and profile entry that are essentially identical. The headlines are got from the RSS feed, while the thumbnail images are fetched directly from the news pages themselves. The data is fetched asynchronously by a cron task that runs at regular intervals. When there is new data it is parsed and stored. This means that no user ever has to wait for the data to be got from the Daily Goss site - it always comes direct from the application.

centrespread is a great site for the discussion of magazines. Site owner Adam Foster asked me to help him by creating a form so visitors can suggest new magazines to be featured.

I made a WordPress plugin for him that submits user input to the database. It’s built on top of the widely-used cforms ii plugin.

“Absolutely 100% perfect. Thank you so much for your help. It is good that there are good people out there who care to do work to perfection as if it were their own.” — Adam Foster, centrespread.

North Devon Pathfinder Trust is a charity which provides training in IT to the local area. To make it easier to track students and enrolments across their numerous centres they wanted to migrate their course management system - previously a standalone desktop Access application - to the web.

I worked in close collaboration with Mat Lemmings of Rencache Limited, an IT support consultant with a strong understanding of Pathfinder’s business and technical needs, to build a solution based on the open source Achievo ATK framework. A rapid development tool for the creation of database-centric applications, ATK proved ideal for their requirements. Pathfinder now have a centrally controlled system which is consistent across all their sites, reducing the risk of confusion and error and making it much easier to manage their data.

Wolf and Water Arts Company is a charity which does art work with various groups. The company wanted a new website to help them manage and present their extensive archives of material related to past and present projects. Their old site was hard to update and hence new content tended to be added belatedly or not at all.

Drupal provided a good match for their needs, with its flexible categorisation and general ease of use. Although the new site has a lot more content, it is more accessible due to the clearer menu structure and other navigation options.

“Likemind were excellent - they took plenty of time to fully understand our requirements, exceeded our expectations & delivered a splendid website on time. Training & follow up was also excellent. I would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone.” - Peter Smith, Wolf + Water.

The brief for the web site of this popular North Devon tourist attraction was to create an attractive modern site with a clear organisational structure which would be maintainable by L&B staff.

Given the large amount of content with varying needs for its presentation and management Drupal was the obvious choice. I created a custom theme and companion module that matched the major divisions of the site and installed and configured other appropriate modules. One of the challenges was in the Visitor section, which is internationalized (in seven different languages) whereas the rest of the site is not.

The result is both aesthetically pleasing (the graphic design in large part thanks to Nik Barrie, the L&B webmaster) and highly functional.

“The web site was excellent, containing a vast amount of information, supported by photography of the highest standard. With an easy to browse layout, the pages provided all the information a potential visitor was likely to need, as well appealing to the narrow gauge railway enthusiast.” - VisitBritain inspection report.

This simple Facebook application was written for musician and journalist Rhodri Marsden to publicise his DIY music project “The Schema“.

It plays a tune! To be more specific, it plays The Schema’s single: Those Rules You Made, available to purchase from all good online outlets from August 20th 2007.

“When I needed to create a Facebook application in a hurry for a music project I was working on, Alfred came up with the goods quickly, completely to spec, and kept me informed throughout. Top hole.”
— Rhodri Marsden.

Imaginary Friends is a Facebook application I wrote to explore the possibilities of the API and to act as an advertisement and demonstration of my services.

It’s quite silly, frankly: it allows you to make friends with, and chat to, some software pretending to be a person under one of a large number of different unlikely pseudonyms.

Still, it’s given me some insight into the possibilities that Facebook offers as a platform. And when I’m bored, there’s always Squirehood Armhole or Flyblow Multinomial to talk to…

I was asked by unit9.com to help develop the backend administration for Metro International’s new website. This involved radical customisation of the Drupal content management system so Metro staff could easily maintain the content of this beautifully designed site with its many complex page structures. It doesn’t look like a Drupal site, does it?

“Working with Alfred from Likemind was great, he knows how to use Drupal to do what is needed and make the project happen. I am very happy with his insight into what features will be useful to the end user without laboring on what will not be as effective.” — Yates Buckley, unit9.

Bitweavers asked me to turn their complex graphical web design for the PhysioDirect site into working HTML and CSS with the requirement that the design should not break when text was enlarged and that it should be compatible with a wide range of browsers.

“… a brilliant job.” — Mike Bridges, Bitweavers.