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.