Porfolio
Headless Shopify Store
Another personal project to try out NextJS. This also gave me the chance to use GraphQL beyond my Contentful integration with Gatsby for this portfolio site.
Headless integrations seem to offer a lot of flexibility and so building a simple store on Shopify's back-end gave me a chance to try that approach.
I also took the chance to utilise Tailwind CSS as well, something else I'd heard lots of but not had a chance to try.
Election Voting Example
This was an example project that allowed the visitor to pick their constituency, say whether they planned to vote in an upcomining election, and if so, what party they were voting for. It also shows the results, both in total and by constituency.
I decided to use the Laravel framework in PHP as a back-end, and VueJS on the front-end. I had not used either before so this seemed a good way to use this as a learning exercise.
Example Jobs Board
An example jobs board created using React.
The jobs themselves are pulled from a local RSS feed file (to simulate using a feed) and the data is used to generate the list.
You can click on each job to reveal more information about the role.
Tap In Concept Store
An ecommerce store created as a concept to put before potential investors.
As the name suggests, this was aimed at selling taps for kitchens and bathrooms online.
I created products using supplied images and data, then designed and built a quick example sample site using WooCommerce on top of WordPress.
Due to the compressed timelines, the site was created by modifying an existing WordPress template.
HA-Pen
This project is a simple home automation setup that uses the Pi-Mote from Energenie to allow the control of power sockets based on timers set by you.
The code is Python, using the Bottle web framework to render a simple UI to allow switching sockets on/off and setting timers (even tracking sunrise and sunset automatically).
Underlying this are some additonal Python scripts that trigger the sockets on the Energenie add-on board that attaches to the Rapsberry Pi's GPIO pins.
Sample Weather App
This is a small app that allows you to search for a city to see what the current weather conditions are at that location.
It will then display the conditions, wind speed and temperature supplied by the Weather API as well as adding a background image using the conditions as a keyword, pulled from Unsplash.
Write Here
I have been known to write fiction when I have time and I’ve used various bits of software over the years. When you’re working on a 50,000 word novel you soon realise Word isn’t ideal; moving chapters around, editing and reformatting become a nightmare.
I've used desktop software like Celtx and Scrivener, but decided to try and build a web version to allow people to write from the growing number of devices with an internet connection and avoid the headache that is synchronisation.
The site was built using MySQL as the data store and PHP for the front-end/back-end based on the CodeIgniter framework. JavaScript was used on the front-end to allow automatic saving, tracking of how many words you had written that day (you could set targets) and drag-and-drop re-ordering of chapters.
OrderTakeaway.co.uk
Long before Just Eat and similar services, I was struggling to find takeaway menus and figured there was an opportunity. The site listed takeaways by area and allowed them to add their menus and even offered online ordering.
As this was before most people had email on their mobile phones, the orders were delivered to the store via fax or SMS.
It was custom built using MySQL as the data store and PHP for front-end/back-end code. The site was sold.
List Books
As a bit of a reader I was running out of space on my bookshelf and, as I rarely re-read them, selling the books seemed like a good way to recoup some money and find them a new home. The problem was eBay and Amazon wanted significant fees, which meant you had to charge a high price to make any money at all. I built List Books to allow anyone to sell their book without a fee. It grew to over 6,000 registered users with more than 40,000 books listed, at which point I sold it on.
This was custom built using MySQL as the data source and PHP as for front-end/back-end integration.