modernProjects

I’ve had enough work this year that I’ve decided to make Modern Projects a little more respectable. I’ve registered for GST, and now I am “Anton Angelo trading as Modern Projects”. First GST return due at the end of the month, but since there are no accounts going out, that makes it easy!

New work this year has included:

• http://www.otago.ac.nz/disabilitystudiesconference/

As well as contract work for the University – looking after communication with postgrads and people who have potentially shown an interest in postgrad study. A bit of data-mining, spreadsheet munging. Its not hard, but then, it isn’t if you know what you are doing!

I’m hosting a few new sites where the clients are doing their own work. My favourite is:

• http://www.tomkirk.co.nz/

Lovely photography.

I thought 2010 might be a bit quieter, but it seems that people still want my expertise.  Current projects in progress  are;

• Australia and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine conference 2010 (still in progress)
• Parenting Partnerships stude site (www.otago.ac.nz/parentingpartnerships – coming soon)
• A site for teaching statistics to Archeology students (started)
• South Pacific Archeological Research (SPAR) – a consultancy website

As well as maintaining AQ.net, Sites, Your Otago Link and various little ongoing jobs.  I’d love to get time to revamp www.davidelliot.com sometime this year as well, and improve the gallery.

Well, a post a year is better than none. Almost.  Here’s what I’ve been up to this year.

www.alumni.otago.ac.nz – this is an implementation of Blackbaud’s netCommunity software.  Its a web front end on the Raiser’s Edge database they have been using at Otago for some time.  They have details on 70,000 alumni, and netCommunity gives the alumni the ability to update their profile online as well as get an @otagoalumni.ac.nz email address.  Getting this up and running in the University environment has been challenging, and I’ve been at it for a day a week for 2 years!  Its going now, and though the software has flaws, I’m pretty happy with it.  I’ll probably write about some of the lessons I’ve learned on my personal blog (this is my work one) at Mumbles.

http://medschool79.otago.ac.nz/ – a quick site for the reunion of the Medical School class of 1979.  Here I worked with the delightful Kerry Buchan.  It was a simple static site with a google form welded in for taking registrations.  I love google forms – they are quick, easy, and powerful letting you share the data in a number of ways.  In this case I just emailed the registrations as a spreadsheet off to Kerry once a week or so.

www.sites.otago.ac.nz – I’m a postgrad anthropology student, so minding the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal System for the Association of Social Anthropologists in new Zealand has been really interesting.  It sits on a Mac on the University network, and chugs along really well.  This year’s project was getting paypal integrated to pay for journal subscriptions, and between me and the Chrystal, the subscriptions manager, it works.  I also do a bit of hands on support with academics publishing papers who find it a bit overwhelming.  Its not the simplest system to use, but it does its job – handling the orkflw for a peer reviewed journal,  very well indeed.

The Otago Post.  I am very used to managing mailing lists using a variety of tools, and the University has hired me as an external consultant to manage a 7.000 member list of prospective post graduate students.  They create a lovely glossy HTML newsletter, and I make sure it gets out, as well as mailing out the Otago Bulletin out to all the post graduate students once a fortnight.  Its trickier than it looks, but people seem to really enjoy hearing from the University, so each mail out only gets a few unsubscription requests.

Currently I’m looking at a website for the International Peace Research Association (iprassociation.org – a Work In Progress!) and updating David Elliot’s wonderful www.davidelliot.org with some new material.  I’ve also said goodbye to www.softbomb.com and www.delgirl.com as they have moved off to a combined content management system, and its looking really good for them!

All in all, Modern Projects is looking well with websites, online community consultancy and email list management all trucking along.  Its been a good year!

Consumate ligger that I am, I have scored a job managing sites.otago.ac.nz. Its a fascinating set of scripts to manage the production of an academic journal put out by the public knowledge project. I’m dead impressed with it as an academic printing press as toaster. Upgrading the original implementation I inherited as 2.1 to 2.2 was made a litle trickier by the bugs in the upgrade scripts, but a few days hacking round sorted me out.

The next step is to weld the university credit card gateway into it, but that’s more a social engineering thing between me and the people responsible with collecting subscriptions.

More news about eightranges.co.nz is coming up, as well as softbomb.com and delgirl.co.nz. They are longing for a makeover, and their manager has got a good, enthusiastic, new developer on their case.

I have compressed and uploaded about 20 shows for my friend Marvin: http:www.mojo.org/communityorchaos I took an image from a poster a mutual mate of ours (political pundit Chris Trotter) had made a nice banner. Its a bit gothic. It could make a nice model for other Hills AM shows, since the government neglected to fund a streaming service for us.

I used the magnificent LAME codec to compress the shows. After much faffing about I found the presets it has, and found lame -preset voice did the trick nicely.

I also finished off our fencing club site: http://www.salle.angelo.gen.nz, with an installation of gallery2 for photos. The boys are dead impressed for three or four hours work. Nice. Oh, and I fenced well enough for them to ask me to join, which was doubly nice. I must frame the certificate.

I’ve been welding gallery2 into the delgirl website as well, I think there is a nice lightweight skin for it I can use that will fit into the wordpress install I’m using for them.

On top of that I got a quick flash job for the Beeb, though a UK mate of mine. It was pretty simple though quite time consuming to get it looking good. It was converting a completely horizontal banner design into a sky scraper. I may even get money out of it!

I’ve been working hard studying for my degree (I got an A, thank you) and then had some time off chilling. About a week. Then all the stalled, forgotten projects I had milling around decide to bite me at once! My uncle is in a fencing club whose webiste was fine, but I thought I’d give it a spruce up, Salle Angelo. Then my friend Marvin at Hills AM catches up with me, and I had promised to podcast his shows. The work has begin on www.mojo.org/communityorchaos.

The photos for my step-sister’s site (more later) have finally arrived, so I’ll have to haul ass and get something together on that as well. That will be a nice corporate site, I reckon. Golf.

Oh, and the ITS website is deteriorating – not badly, just needs a real spruce up – but with hundreds of pages, content managed by a half dozen people it needs a CMS. Just which one? Ahh: university politics…

Luckily I’ve got a few days off this week. That will work well, though I have to set up my workspace a bit better!

I’m having one of those days where everything I do is made just that little harder by having to upgrade each bit of software I’m using, or the font works on the mac but not the PC or my wireless router falls off the network during an upload. 4 hours to do 2 1/2 hours work. Sigh.

Well, at least its pretty work on http://www.davidelliot.org. The image below is for one of the books he illustrated, the Great Tree of Avalon, and it was pretty humbling seeing it in _every_ Barnes and Noble and Borders I went into in the US. The work today was mostly tidying, and securing up directory index access using an .htaccess file.

Information Technology Services look after all the computers, lecture theatres, network, telephones, printery and a myriad of other operational details at the University of Otago.

Their website had stalled since its first incarnation back in the late 90′s and one of my first jobs was to get it in some sort of shape.  Many, many meetings later I had a navigational structure based on services, not the byzantine organizational structure ITS adopts, as well as a nice design done by the University Web Office.   The final icing was a notices page built by one of my colleagues, Geoff Hughes.

It took a year to implement after 4 or 5 years of lying stale, and it gets a lot of traffic from the local IT people as the first place to go when there are general network or IT problems.  I manage about 4 or 5 separate editors looking after different parts of the site on a few hundred pages, using Mint as a back-end logging program as the Universities logging efforts are nto really up to commercial scratch.

The next step will be to roll the whole thing into a CMS.  I wonder if WordPress will do it?

The HelpDesk is a busy service desk supporting 30,000 students and staff at the University of Otago. The staff there need to be able to communcate with each other very quickly and have uncluttered access to various web based resources.

This site has links to all the internal websites for changing passwords, checking services, and general administration. Included are two panes, one an RSS feed of internal service notices, the other a representation of recent jabber based chat in the HelpDesk chat room used to communicate internally. I specced the page out, made wireframes, and then supervised its construction. It also has a mediawiki wiki built into it as a knowledge base. it has been very well received.

Southernwinejournal.com was a great idea, well implemented, but maybe just at the wrong time. My colleagues Richard W. and Callum M. worked together often in our day jobs, and I thought that we could make something together – a wine blog showcasing Richard’s wine knowlegdge and pithy writing.

We worked hard on it, and created a really great site. Then Richard needed to concentrate on his job, and So did Callum. So its on ice.

Callum taught me a lot about modern web techniques, introduced me to the joys of Blog software and how it can be gracefully subverted to your own ends. I hope I showed him a bit of code, and database design. He certainly did a fantastic job of doing the front end design. It looks classy in a sans-serif modern kinda way, but keeping with the style that wine based merchandising requires.

We talked and worked together a lot, learned a lot, and pizza did get eaten at the office, though I’m not normally one to work late ones.

Richard got us lots of great content to develop with, and I don’t think any of us is at all concerned that it was a waste of time: its ready to be resurrected at the very least.