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.
Closing down at the end of 2023 calendar year, so not accepting new
accounts.
- 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.
Written with a sprinkling of JSON-LD
for the concert events for machine-readable aggregation.
- abacus pre-school web site
-
A one-page site for a local pre-school I used to have links to.
For learning and teh lolz 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. Now waiting for the
pre-school committee to work out a replacement site before I turn this
one off…
- 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.