David Linnard Portfolio » MySQL

Freeview

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:23:34 +0000

For my role at the digital agency The Grand Union, I was tasked with carrying out PHP development for the Freeview website. This includes all of the PHP created for the updated Freeview HD and Freeview Plus sections of the site as well as the What’s New page. Other tasks included ensuring the site was properly optimised for the flood of traffic which occurred when the HD section went live and also moving the site to a new web server.

E.on Great Saves / E.on Talking Energy

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 09:15:34 +0000

Maintenance work on these eZ Publish based sites. Amends included the addition of timed polls and amends onthe Flash competitions on the site. Other changes included incorporating changes made by third parties on to the site and providing stats using custom PHP scripts to extract information from eZ Publish.

FilmClub

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:36:51 +0000

Filmclub is a government funded initiative to provide free access to a wide variety of films for state schools to allow them to set up their own after school film clubs (you can find out more here).

As well as ensuring all client side code is cross browser compliant (for the CSS, javascript and XHTML), I worked on various bug fixes resulting from a very large growth of the site in a very small amount of time. This culminated in overseeing the successful integration of a brand new database into the site.

David Linnard Portfolio/Blog

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:58:16 +0000

A simple wordpress site to hold details about myself and my work recently updated from a custom PHP solution. It was easy to setup and the majority of the work was creating the wordpress theme for use on the site. Third party extensions helped to speed up development and the built in Wordpress CMS is perfect for the purpose. The use of wordpress has made the site much more powerful and extendable and development work on it is much improved.

An additional wordpress theme was setup for me to start writing a tech blog, in order to better articulate and demonstrate my technical skills and depth of knowledge.

ElleUK

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:50:08 +0000

While I was working for Hachette Filipacchi, my main role was to assist with maintaining and the development of the ELLEuk.com site (based on the eZ Publish content management system). As well as upgrading the Content Management System, a lot of development work took place on the site. Starting with the ELLE Beauty channel, I developed the PHP for ELLE.tv, In The Mag and the News channels. I also helped develop the Culture channel. I was also the lead developer on the Catwalk channel which had a massive increase in page views and unique visitors compared to the previous year. The final development I was involved with was for a new look homepage.

Developments for the site involved utilising the features of the eZ Publish CMS. Presentation logic was all carried out in the SMARTY style templating language eZ Publish uses. As well as this new extensions for the CMS were created to carry out such tasks as bulk image uploading and providing convenient access to custom database logic required on the site. One of the biggest extensions I built during my time there was a Keywording extension to ensure consistency throughout the keywords and to provide an easier interface for both adding keywords to articles and maintaining the keywords themselves.

As well as the redevelopment work, I was tasked with implementing commercial takeovers. These happened on a weekly basis across various pages on the site. I implemented a timed system so that these could go up and come down automatically. The CSS (as well as any necessary javascript and html) was then produced and tested by the client before the takeover went live. Examples of takeover implementation are shown below.

Sugarscape

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:42:30 +0000

As well as developing the ELLEuk.com site at Hachette Filipacchi, I also helped maintain and develop the Drupal based sugar magazine website called Sugarscape. This involved ensuring any bugs found on the site were dealt with in a timely manner and also new developments such as the Sugarscape games channel were completed. Other developments included the addition of user galleries and, as with ELLEuk.com, ensuring commerical takeovers went live on the site smoothly.

I was also the technical help on the Sugarscape webchats for the games channel, where celebrities such as Alesha Dixon, Miley Cyrus and The Veronicas had webchats with the site users. This involved ensuring that the webchats themselves went smoothly for both the celebrities and the site editors and also ensuring the webchat transcript was displayed as soon as possible after the end of the webchat.

Psychologies

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:24:26 +0000

While I was developing websites for HF-UK, part of my initial brief was to bug fix on the hugely popular Psychologies website. This included style fixes and also ensuring the Flash based quizzes functioned correctly.

Luv4Juice

admin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:51:30 +0000

The main aim was to produce a site which enabled users to exchange their recipes and also see the nutritional value both in the recipes and in individual pieces of fruit itself. Additional aims were to gain experience of using AJAX and the MVC architecture in a web project.

The design of the site uses CSS heavily to match the design brief originally created. By using AJAX, user are able to see the nutritional value of recipes they create while they produce them. Once recipes are produced, they are stored in a MySQL database where other users can view them, rate them and add them to their favourites. An amazon a-store was added to the site to provide an easy way of purchasing juicing solutions, such as books or juicing machines. The a-store utilised the basic amazon template which then had CSS applied in order to match the style of the main sections of the site.

Gloucestershire Police

admin — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:44:12 +0000

Gloucestershire Constabulary is composed of 3 divisions. Each of these divisions had their own intranet site, and each of these intranet sites contained large quantities of information. I was employed in order to develop the appearance, layout and content of website for The Cotswold and Stroud Division of the Constabulary.

The main aim was to design and develop a site with a corporate colour scheme and layout that increased coherence between the divisional intranet site, and the county intranet site. It needed to be easy to use and also easy to update, as the people updating the site may not be skilled in web-based development. The updates will be made through Microsoft FrontPage and so the site needed to be maintainable through this. Due to the large amount of content on the site, the structure of it required re-developing and also a lot of new content needed to be added.

The site was redeveloped using templating to ensure future updates to the appearance of the site can be made quickly and easily. CSS was used in order to develop the styles within the site and ASP and PHP were used in order to provide dynamic content. ASP was used on pages which users would need to update, since PHP could not be displayed in an understandable format for users maintaining the site using Microsoft FrontPage. Where possible, index pages were automatically written at runtime to ensure updates to the site are automatically referenced elsewhere within the site. Finally the structure of the site was re-developed to ensure that the site is much more maintainable, expandable and usable.

Dave's Travel Log

admin — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:56:33 +0000

Between November 2005 and November 2006 travelled around the world, I set up this site to provide a way for friends and family to keep track of where I was and what I had been up to.

The site has to display photos, details of what I have been upto and videos of the places I go. Since I will be maintaining the site in Internet Cafes with unknown facilities, a web based content Management System is required to ensure that changes to the site content can be made quickly and easily.

The site was created using a combination of Flash, CSS, PHP and MySQL. A PHP based content management system was setup to store details of the photos, videos and diary entries stored. This also handles file uploads and deletions. The main site then loads these at runtime based on the country currently being displayed. A simple Flash menu bar was created to direct the user around the site which is then styled using CSS.

While travelling basic AJAX was added to the site to ensure that people viewing the site through Internet Explorer did not have to activate the menu bar on each page, due to changes in Internet Explorer while I was away. This was achieved through dynamically loading the content through one main page using javascript.