Just finished a four–month stint hacking Drupal to help finish the marvellous new Watershed website. A real pleasure to work with David, Oliver et al — good times.

After a long hiatus, finally a new post on my blog. And why? Well, because I’ve just made the new version of Commentpress public. Nothing to do now but wait for feedback — oh, and make a start some of the enhancements I’ve got in mind.

The latest project that I’ve done with Futurelab has kept up the tradition of being nominated for a New Statesman New Media award. Congratulations to the team on the nomination and commiserations that it didn’t win the award this year.

Congratulations to the Create-a-scape team on the announcement of their nomination in this year’s New Statesman New Media Awards. They’ve been selected as finalists in the education category which apparently “go to the body or project that has made the most significant contribution to education through the use of new media technology.”

I worked with them on the support website for the project and through that have read most of the support material for it. I reckon they’d be deserving winners. It’s an excellent and innovative idea and I hope it goes far — good luck folks!

[Update] Create-a-scape went on to win the award last night (24th July 2007).

New Media Awards 2007 Winners

Congratulations!

Go on, you know you want to swap a car trip for something better — walk, cycle, hang-glide, whatever — perhaps even work from home for the day if your employer will let you. Whatever you do, register it on the site I just built with the chaps at Tijuana Design:

Change Your World website

Nigel from Telepathy spotted Planet 10 — which we made together — spinning away in the background as Blair gave a speech on education recently. This was the speech if you have the inclination to read it.

The Haystack Admin System powers the new website for the Arnolfini, Bristol’s premier art gallery. Well, most of it, anyway. There’s a standard news system with a bespoke database for managing the events that the gallery puts on, from film to exhibitions, from dance to performance art. All that remains to do is to build the vcal exporter so that people can subscribe to the schedule from within a calendar application such as iCal. I’ll update this entry once it’s done. In the meantime, get down there – there are lots of interesting things going on.

Yup, that’s right, the shiny revamp of the Bristol Old Vic website has gone live with the new incarnation of the Haystack Admin System. The updated system bristles with a whole heap of new features and modules, but, above all, I’m particularly pleased that I can now subscribe to their forthcoming schedule directly through iCal in Mac OSX, although I’m told there’s now a nifty iCal plugin for Firefox through which one can also subscribe happily on any OS. I don’t even know if the Old Vic staff are aware that they can get the schedule in RSS and iCal formats, but I decided to bung in the functionality anyway. Dan Brickley reminded me on the Bristol Wireless chat channel of the importance of the machine-readable web, and persuaded me that it would be worth the effort. I hope it makes a difference to someone… sometime… somewhere…

The Haystack Admin System gets another outing for the Encounters Festivals at the Watershed in Bristol with the launch of websites for the Animated Encounters and Brief Encounters short film festivals.

Solar System Explorer

The Planet Science blurb says:

Explore the planets, comets and asteroids on an interactive virtual fly-through. Zoom in close on a particular planet or choose a different orbit view to see the whole system from afar. The data sheets let you discover more about some of the elements that make up our Solar System.

World Builder

Think you could create the perfect World? Here’s your chance to try. With World Builder, you call the shots. Work your way through each of the creation screens, but make your choices wisely, only certain conditions will ensure your planet is a successful place to grow and evolve.

The project won a Technical Achievement Honorable Mention from Macromedia in their eLearning Innovations thingy… Planet 10 was the first project where Flash had been integrated with Director’s (then new) 3D capabilities. Here’s what they said:

Planet 10 exemplifies an incredible use of interactive 3D to teach science imaginatively. Learners get to “fly through” the solar system and gain a sense of the size and relative location of the planets. By building their own planet, learners discover first-hand what it takes to make a viable planet. Students specify attributes for a planet, such as water and geographic composition, and the application determines how the planet will fare in the solar system. This is a great example of incorporating logical thinking into an application: in this case, getting kids to blend decision-making with scientific know-how and then see the results of those decisions.

See this quote in context here

A word of sadness, however. I spent almost a week on the explosion effects that take place when your planet collides with another — and then both DirectX and the Shockwave plugin underwent upgrades which seem to have disabled the explosions completely. Not that anyone other than me noticed, but I should really mention it to the client even if there’s no money to fix it.

Sigh.

Shockwave Status:

Click here to play

I’ve been enjoying mucking around with templates for various open source packages recently. Firstly, after long discussion, I got tired of the chatter, and simply went ahead and revamped the MailMan mailing list manager templates for the Underscore Archives.

Flush from my success in upgrading the MailMan templates from rather dodgily-written HTML3.2 to semantically (more) meaningful HTML4.01, I then took another look at the Bristol Wireless website, which consists entirely of an install of PhpWiki. It was great to see how the site had come along in the last year.

So then, two new skins for two websites in two weeks, two new wrappers that I hope make more sense of existing content, and I have to say that skinning up has never been quite so much fun.

The photograph above illustrates the homepage of the website I’ve just finished for The Dolphin Connection Experience, a company which will take you to the Azores and organise boat trips so you can swim around with – well, you guessed it – dolphins. Gotta be a good way to spend some time, methinks.

The Bath Literature Festival website has gone live again – a revamp and upgrade by the Swirl-Haystack collaborative enterprise.

The main interface of the audio toy

What you can do, however, is play with audio from the built-in sound libraries, or record your own if you have a microphone. The “keyboard” allows you to play the sounds pitch-shifted to a maximum of one octave up or down, and the sequencer screen makes it easy to overlay up to four audio tracks.

Here’s the link to the page from which you can launch it:

Planet Science | Out There

Enjoy!

The Dance South West website has gone live – yet another Swirl-Haystack collaboration. Someday I’ll figure out another way of announcing new projects. For now, this’ll do.

Next step: create the Bath Music Festival site. I’m becoming more and more enamoured with the PHP/MySQL combination. Not as much immediate interaction as technologies such as Flash, Director, and so on, but damn, it’s effective in making websites more than just brochures. Gotta love it.

Sadly, these two demos only stay online because Telepathy host them. The BBC seem to have kind of given up on TOTP’s interactive content, though I’ve heard that they are busy transferring their focus to interactive TV instead. Since CDROMs seem to have died a death as an entertainment medium, this is probably a wise move.

Shockwave Status:

Click here to play

The first TOTP CDROM was my first major interactive project – I spent six months of my life getting my head round the quirks and intricacies of Director to program it. A six month spell of working in India followed, as a means of rekindling my creative energies.

Still, winning the Macromedia UCON Best Entertainment CDROM award kind of compensated for all the heart- (and head-) aches. Now that Nigel and Sarah are leaving to spend the next few years on tropical beaches, I wonder what will become of the beautiful plastic award that used to sit on the shelf in the Telepathy toilets?

Shockwave Status:

Click here to play