MY-CRON.CO.UK

My CRON is a script scheduler for those people who cannot run cron jobs (or schedule scripts to run) on their server.

Every user can set up a free weekend job. This will run once at some point (determined by me) over the weekend. This is perfect for sending out weekly bulletins or cleaning up your database routinely.

Users who need scripts to run more regularly can set up jobs with a small charge. For example, a script that runs every hour of every day for 1 full year would cost less than £90 to set up.

To discuss your requirements, complete the schedule form online.

Judith Cowan

Judith Cowan is a London based visual artist. You can see examples of her work on the website.

Judith wanted a website that she could maintain herself - once the design had been completed. I was commissioned to design a content management system that integrated with the website design and that would allow Judith to manage the content - most of which takes the form of images.

I decided to integrate as fully as possible with the existing design so that navigating the content management was the same as navigating the website itself. The information would be displayed in an identical way - but it would be possible to delete images, move them around and alter the "meta data" for each image in a simple, and consistent, way.

Book Cloud - Win an Ipod

Since I launched the Book Cloud website, I've had a mixture of responses about it's usefulness. The University of Abertay Dundee listed it as Website of the Week (week commencing 5th July) whereas posts to a library student community forum described it as "completely useless". I am still unsure about whether as a tool it has any "legs", so to speak. The effectiveness of it (if it has any) and my ability to assess it's usefulness depends entirely on books being added to the database and high quality tags being added.

Before I decide whether this experimental website is worth developing any further, I really do need to get more, and more varied, books into the database.

To this end, I am offering an incentive of a New Ipod (the one with video playback). All books that meet the draw eligibiility criteria will be entered into the draw. The draw will take place on the 31st October 2006. Visit the site for the rules and to add your titles.

Azem William - Interactive Design - Bespoke CMS

A relatively small project, this involved the development of a simple content management system for Azem William's website.

Azem is a graphic designer based in London. I worked with him on the West Yorkshire Probation Board website.

He needed a very simple system that would allow him to maintain his portfolio of work easily, quickly and consistently on his somewhat avant garde website.

The CMS is written in PHP and supported by a MySQL relational database.

Book Cloud - How It Works

I have changed the query that generates the book cloud slightly.

Originally, when you clicked a title in the cloud, the web server would examine the keywords that are linked to that title and then pull in all the other titles on the database that share one or more keywords with that title. The books are then displayed around your chosen title - with those that are most popular being larger and nearer to your title. Popular is defined as books that either have been added to the database the most or have higher click through rates.

This does result in a few anomalies, however. So I have changed the query so that those books which match more of the keywords that your title has are also given choice positions in the cloud. So if your book has the keywords Fiction,Children,India then books that have the same keywords will be prioritised followed by books that match two followed by books that match one. Books that don't match any will not appear. The popularity is still factored in however and sometimes very popular books might cancel out this factor.

As the database is currently quite small - anomalies still appear but these will be less likely as the database grows and more linkages are created.

Book Cloud

Book Cloud is an experimental website that allows users to search for titles visually, by popularity and by keyword.

Book covers are displayed in a "cloud". The most popular (most frequently added or puchased) titles are visually larger on screen than the others. Users can click on the covers to find other books that are similar to the one they clicked.

Anyone can add books to the site - there is no registration process. Books are automatically linked with books that have the same keywords.

Once you've found a book on the site, you can buy it via the Blackwell's Online Bookshop.

West Yorkshire Probation Board

I redeveloped West Yorkshire Probation Board's website as part of my full time employment there. The work was undertaken in partnership with Azem William Interactive Design. Azem provided the visual concept and I constructed the databases, the stylesheets and did the development coding in PHP.

Like the NPRIE site, the site does need to be updated by non-technical users so the site is very simple. The site uses CSS extensively to make it look more complex than it actually is. Fundamentally, though, each page is simply text with the option of one image. The home page, which has more images, is put together from 4 or 5 separate tables (one for the vacancies, one for the publications, one for the home page "feature", one for the "meet the team" feature etc).

The site is written in XHTML and fulfils all the automatic checks of the Web Accessibility Initiative.

In the coming months, it is my intention to code up the editing suite to allow staff to edit and add pages; and to make the West Yorkshire Probation library catalogue available. I am currently considering whether to use an off the shelf solution for this or to develop something myself.

Just Published

Just Published is a simple web tool that integrates with the Blackwell Online Bookshop affiliate programme and converts new book lists, created with My-RSS.CO.UK, into html lists with titles, summaries, price, availability and front cover thumbnails.

I have set up a number of book lists - generally on subjects that interest me. But there are innumerable subjects available for others to create lists on. In return, contributors can accrue commission on sales arising from their lists as I can link Blackwell Affiliate accounts (other than my own) with lists.

NPRIE

NPRIE is the National Probation Research and Information Exchange. It is an autonomous organisation that acts as a consultative, supportive network for probation research and information staff.

I have been involved in the development of the NPRIE website for a few years now. On the face of it, the site is very simple (the design is largely graphics free) but underneath there is a lot going on.

Every page on the site (including all links, the menu, the acronyms etc etc) is created on the fly - all powered by a fairly hefty MySQL database.

The aim of the site is to enable the NPRIE committee to communicate with, and deliver services to, NPRIE members in a timely fashion. This meant without having to wait for a web developer to have time to upload new information.

I wrote an article for UKEIG Elucidate last month which delved a little into the "behind the scenes" workings of the site. The article is available only to members of UKEIG on the UKEIG website.

The NPRIE website is one of the key routes through which NPRIE offers services. These include:

• The Probation Thesaurus
• The Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• The Probation Gateway
• News Bulletins (created with the My-RSS website!)
• The National Probation Research Collection

NPRIE itself, however, offers a great deal more.

Recent developments on the site include live statistical reports (based on our membership profile and on web accesses) using the libchart php libraries.

My-RSS.CO.UK

My-RSS.CO.UK is a simple rss feed generator that I developed (privately) to help with the production of news bulletins in my day job. I use the website every day to keep colleagues at West Yorkshire Probation Board (and more generally in the Criminal Justice System) about the latest news in Criminal Justice. There is also a feed for West Yorkshire News.

The site has developed quite rapidly from being little more than a form-fed database - to a relatively sophisticated tool for aggregating news. It's aim has always been to facilitate the creation of human focused, topical RSS feeds.

In addition to adding items to feeds by entering them into a form, it is also possible to:

Add by "Cherry Picking"
Users can store regularly consulted RSS feeds from other news sites in their profile - and then quickly "cherry pick" relevant items from these feeds for their own feed. This speeds up the process of creating a news feed considerably as no inputting is required.

Add by "Scraping"
For some websites, I created profiles that allow My-RSS to "scrape" the headline, summary, date etc from individual news pages. All the user needs to do is supply the URL. This has been extended to facilitate the creation of book lists. The user simply has to specify the ISBN and the website will scrape the bibliographic detail of the book from the Blackwell Online Bookshop website. Separate websites have been created to host these lists - though, of course, they can also be distributed as RSS feeds.

The latest development is some simple statistical reporting tools to allow users to see how well their (and other) lists are doing.

For more information about developments with My-RSS, see the My-RSS blog.