my little corner of the web
things I’ve built
- matrep school report system
-
A major
SaaS
project I built up from scratch and have successfully
run as a “hobby” (but deadly serious) business for many years.
Django,
PostgreSQL,
full version control with
SVN, hand-crafted
RTF,
PDF creation etc etc.
Focused on speed and ease of use, hundreds of staff and parent users.
- abacus pre-school web site
-
A one-page site for a local pre-school I used to have links to.
For learning and a general laugh rather than any real need, I went to
town optimizing this one:
data URI
initial images with
lazy-loading
of the real ones, inline minified
CSS and
JS,
Brotli compression
for
compatible browsers.
Responsive,
mobile-first
design;
service worker
to support
offline use.
- lichfield cathedral chorus web site
-
My newest project: another Django site for my choir. This uses
CSS Grid
to provide a responsive, mobile-first design and a service worker
to allow offline reference. As it is served via
HTTPS
and has a manifest file,
it can be
“installed”
as a web app.
Served with a sprinkling of RDFa
for the concert events.
- matmonitor web page tester (now gone)
-
This was a good project: a monitoring and change notification service like
Pingdom’s core
offering, but much more lightweight. Used
Twilio
for SMS alerts. I thought it
was awesome, but failed to attract any subscribers so shut it down. I think it
would have been a success a decade or so earlier when web hosting was
less reliable.