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.
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.