Mad Web Skills

Earlier this month, I was invited to speak at the Excellence In Local Government Customer Service 2008 conference in Sydney. It was my first time presenting on my own outside of companies I’d worked for. (I did the same presentation about two months earlier at a different conference, but I shared the presenting with another staff member on the team.) Now, I’m quite comfortable speaking in front of many people (this conference had about 150 attendees), however there’s always that part of me at the back of my mind wondering if these people are interested in what I have to say. Well, this particular presentation went really well. I got a lot of good questions, which means they were listening at least, and some great, positive feedback.

The topic of my presentation was in relation to how Local Government all-too-commonly tend to spend obscene amounts of money to solve simple problems. At my day-job we had implemented an online appointment system for the public to arrange a time to see a town planner. We had initially contacted our current software vendors to see what they could offer, but these solutions were going to cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. We had a budget of $3.50, a half-roll of sticky-tape and some pocket lint. (Okay it was a bit more than that, but not much!)

I ended up finding a php script offered by an independent Dutch developer that cost $50 USD. I was then able to configure it to our needs, customise it to match the look-and-feel of our website and have it launched in about six week. This kind of application roll-out method is quite familiar to many freelance web gurus, but it’s quite different to how most government organisations work, which I believe is why my presentation went down so well.

Personally, I prefer to develop my web applications from scratch, incorporating all and only the features I require. It then becomes a fun learning exercise or an excuse to try out some new techniques, but in real-world situations like this, a cheap, off-the-shelf script is exactly what we needed. The project was delivered on time, on budget and I was held aloft on the shoulders of my team-mates as they cheered my name. (Okay, so that didn’t happen… I think someone may have said “good job” or something though, so that’s cool.)

Bruce Mactier Building Designers is a Shepparton-based business which has been providing quality, affordable design services since 1984 and Mad Web Skills were lucky enough to have the opportunity to build their new website.

Bruce and the team were great to work with, and I had a lot of fun with the project.

In the “you learn something new every day” category, comes this. I just found out that when working with php, you can use block commenting (like /*this*/) in the middle of a line of code. For example, if you have something like this:

$debug = 'really cool ';
echo 'This is my '.$debug.'script!';

… you can remove your debug display by commenting it out mid-line like this:

$debug = 'really cool ';
echo 'This is my './*$debug.*/'script!';

Now, this may already be obvious to everyone else, but I thought this was pretty handy to know.

At WDS08 I discussed using Javascript to create games with Miles Eftos, who created a version Super Mario Bros in Javascript. Matt Wescott has gone one better to create a ZX Spectrum emulator in JavaScript. Now, how about a C64 emulator?

I first saw lead Django developer, Adrian Holovaty, speak brilliantly at Web Directions 07 about how to present data more effectively. Now, I’ve just learned that he is also an awesome guitarist! Also he’s a fan of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Ahhh… Now it all makes sense.