Category Archives: Portfolio

Portfolio of recent development and design by Martyn Walker

Never miss an important Twitter message again

On Monday Adam and I released PalRelay.  It is a solution to finding information without having to navigate the rats nest of irrelevant information often found in search results.

It is not a replacement for searching, its an enhancement that will reduce the number of irrelevant pages found by with the leverage of opinion from friends and colleagues.

It also solves issues that have been headlining recently.  Taking control of your privacy and retaining ownership of your social graph.  PalRelay allows you to decide who gets to know you and how they use that data.  It allows you to remain completely anonymous yet should a website request personalization privileges you can choose whether to allow it or not.

The impression that personalization is universally a bad thing is a decision each individual has to decide.  I like the idea that Amazon tailors its website to my likes and dislikes.

PalRelay acts as a gatekeeper to your personal information and can be used to stop commercial organisations from surreptitiously recording personal information.  Equally it solves the privacy issue by allowing you, the owner of the private data to decide who gets to see it and use it.

PalRelay goes everywhere with me except secure pages (SSL addresses beginning with https such as online banking pages).  Its useful while blogging too, see the following short video for an example:

Posted in Facebook, I can't think of a category, PalRelay, Portfolio, Social Media, Software, twitter | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Kty West Wildlife Artist

Kty is beginning a new website and wanted a PDF handout to demonstrate her work. Still in its infancy stages I have helped her assemble a few of the features of her WordPress website, these include.

  • A new WordPress template
  • A commercial auction plugin for her charity work
  • I created WordPress plugin specifically for Kty
  • A short video (see low res youtube version below)
  • A downloadable PDF with embedded video

You can see Kty’s website at http:/www.ktywest.co.uk/

Posted in Portfolio, Video | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The best wiki for customisation

wiki’s make it easy to edit through the browser. I like everything about them except for two irritating problems.

  • They all look the same
  • They are not easy to customise

Both problems now solved by wikkawiki.

It remains a wiki without the extensive features of the growing groupware solutions such as tikiwiki which are amazing feats of engineering, but only serve to complicate something that is supposed to be easy.

wikkawiki produces excellent documentation, fast.  Setup accounts for your editors then disable login and you remain in control of who gets to edit.

Styling the wiki can be done through CSS plus a header.php and footer.php file. Click here for an example of one with a modified design.

It includes Geshi by default (for colourised code snippets) and you can wirte PHP directly into a page and it will be evaluated at read time.

see http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage for more details.

Posted in CSS, Portfolio, Programming, Wiki | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Using twitter as an alerting platform

mypph 300x228 Using twitter as an alerting platformI received an email from Clickatell inviting me to top up my SMS account.  After a split second consideration I realised I did not need them anymore.  Sorry Clickatell!

Twitter is more convenient.  I have setup a few private accounts and subscribed to them through my own.  When an event occurs I receive notification direct to my phone as a free SMS message direct from twitter.

Although twitter has been unreliable lately it has proven to be more convenient than using Clickatell.  In time twitter will iron out the problems andthey may even be suitable for mission critical solutions.  I hope so because they are easy to use and should spawn many superb product ideas all designed to keep us informed with the information we want now, not just when we visit facebook.

Posted in Javascript, PHP, Portfolio, Programming, twitter | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Creating an eBay shop template

draft4 300x240 Creating an eBay shop templateA work in progress for www.rap4.com a real action paintball supply company.

This eBay Shop Template includes the code to link to store categories, the auctions ending soon as well as a mini listing for each product in the store.

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Payment Processing for Onelogbook

homepage 150x150 Payment Processing for OnelogbookOnelogbook is an outdoor sports activity program currently in development. My task was to add Paypal payment processing to the joining form.

Technologies used were PHP, MySQL, Javascript and I created a few minor graphics. Payment information is sent to Paypal for processing. On successful payment Paypal return IPN (Instant Payment Notification) code to the website and the user is authorised to use the website extended features.

Javascript is used for form validation and PHP provides the server side code. If a payment is cancelled user details are removed from memory and the database is not updated (you can see the cancellation notice at the end of this short high speed video).

And a “Please Wait” graphic -- scourge of Paypal Payment Processing!

pleasewait Payment Processing for Onelogbook

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New widget for Styleroomz

Styleroomz asked for a widget to showcase products. Data is retrieved from their affiliate source as XML in a zip file.

The XML is updated daily to ensure prices and special offers are fresh.

The widget uses HTML, XML, MySQL, Javascript and PHP. Data sources include XML for the affiliate information such as coded links, pictures, pricing and store information, and MySQL used by the Styleroomz ecommerce software to link to their pages. The Yui library from Yahoo was used to create the carousel effect.

The following short video demonstrates how the widget in use.

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Redesigning Styleroomz Product Search

search results 300x230 Redesigning Styleroomz Product SearchI was given the opportunutiy to alter the search results layout for Styleroomz.com, a fashion website for dress sizes between 16 and 20.  The improved search design required alterations to PHP and Javascript.

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Lanzaventura Vacation Club

zoltan 300x256 Lanzaventura Vacation ClubThe site owner needed a new button added which required a small modification to the Javascript and the creation of two images.

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Terry Pratchett Quotes WordPress Plugin

Click here to download the Terry Pratchett Quotes WordPress Plugin/widget.

If you are a fan of Terry Pratchett then how can you resist a free Terry Pratchett Quotes plugin windget?  To install download the pratchett.zip unpack to your hard drive and then upload the pratchett folder to your WordPress plugins folder.  After activating the plugin go to your Widgets (in the Appearance menu) and drag it to your sidebar.

The widget adopts your template design automatically and displays quotes at random.


Moist Von Lipwig by ~rhianimated on deviantART

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