With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay.

I’m particularly passionate about helping charities, music organisations, and magazine publishers make use of the web as effectively as possible. I can help such organisations work out how what they do in other environments translates to the web, and then to build the tools to make that happen. I prefer nuance to buzzwords, but I can throw around the appropriate Web 2.0 terms if I have to.

(and if you don’t fit in that list but have a project you think I might find interesting, I’m still interested in hearing from you)

I’m used to working solo, or in a small team, and have experience of leading teams as well as being a member. I’d prefer something in or around London, but usually work from home and am quite open to remote working.

I’ve got three, or maybe four days available for the next couple of months. You can reach me at james@jystewart.net to find out more.

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Thanks to some hard design work on the part of Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma I was able to launch a new look for the website of singer/songwriter Sarah Masen a week or so ago. Sarah’s recently released three new EPs (her first releases since 2001, and all with hand made packaging) and it was high time the site got a new lease of life.

At heart, the site is a simple rails application, and we’re still making frequent updates as we let the new design settle in and begin to hook the site together with the new web world that has sprung up since it was last given any real attention. One of the latest changes is the use of the flickraw gem to pull in photos from gigs. We’re using last.fm’s machine tags to identify events, which may not be the best route as we build out the archive but for now provides a nice way to disambiguate events on flickr, with the fringe benefit that the photos show up on last.fm too.

Look out for more updates soon and give the EPs a listen!

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I am not a visual designer. That’s a statement that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s spent much time on one of the sites for which I am solely responsible. Thankfully I have numerous friends and colleagues who are designers and thanks to them there are a number of projects which have come out looking good.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to redesign this site. To give it more presence, to make it a bit friendlier, but mainly to make it neater. I’ve had numerous ideas, but always lacked either the time or the skill to make them a reality. But today, finally, I have at least achieved the third of my aims. It’s all thanks to the CSS framework of the moment, blueprint, and a little free time to work on it.

I’m not really a fan of the various toolkits for grid-based design. I don’t like presentation-focussed class names cluttering my HTML. But they do help in getting a clean design out the door quickly, and so I’ve conceded in this case to use blueprint and hope that the microformats included alongside it redeem the use of class names like ‘column’ and ’span-10′.

If I had still more time I’d like to write a parser that will use those class names as a base and generate stylesheets that apply the same styling to the more appropriate class names the HTML already holds. But I don’t, so for now, things are as they are. Please let me know if you spot any glitches—I’m sure there are some I’ve yet to spot—and hopefully the new design will make this site a little easier to follow.

Next I need to take the blog’s look and apply it across the rest of the site.

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One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com.

The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification.

I also took the table-based HTML of the main site and reworked it as XHTML and CSS. It may have saved time to just work with the existing templates, but after all these years of avoiding tables for everything but tabular content, it hurt too much not to have a validating front page.

There have already been a few changes made as we load more data in and hit it with real requests, and thanks to the flexibility of rails and capistrano it will remain nice and easy to keep revising as we go along.

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In the process of catching up with some neglected tasks, I’ve pushed out new releases of both of my PEAR packages.

Services_Technorati receives a version number bump, and little else. The alpha release was never meant to last quite this long given that it’s merely a port of a very stable package, and it’s finally marked beta. My hope is that the beta release will pick up a few more users to put it through its paces.

I had wondered about adding in some extra classes to encapsulate responses, but at the end of the day simplexml does a decent job, is well documented, and doesn’t add any overhead, so I’m happy just returning its objects and letting people work with them.

There are also a couple of bug fixes for the stable release of XML_Feed_Parser, kindly contributed by users. There are still a couple of outstanding tickets, but they’re issues which require more thought so I’m postponing them for 1.0.3 or 1.1.0.

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