modernProjects

Posted by anton.angelo at May 22nd, 2010

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.

Posted by Anton at June 27th, 2008

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.

Posted by Anton at June 29th, 2007

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!

Posted by Anton at January 14th, 2007

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?

Posted by Anton at January 14th, 2007

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.

Posted by Anton at October 31st, 2006

I’ve been working at Hills AM: the local community access radio station for a while. I do some vanity broadcasting there with a show at 9am on a Tuesday morning playing some obscure pop music (and sometimes not so obscure).

They have asked me to manage acquiring an FM licence to go with their AM one after a recent government announcement that they were releasing some frequencies for community use. I kicked the project off yesterday with a bit of a brainstorm and a few conference calls to other community access station managers seeing if there were economies of scale to be achieved. There are at least two other NZ community access stations wanting to do the same thing.

We got most of the main areas of work captured;

• Funding
• Integration with current systems
• Kit acquisition
• Marketing
• Legal work

I think with the current station staff we can build a WBS and farm out jobs quite nicely.

This looks like a good job for 2007.