MAKE SITES .CC

One of the major websites promoting Australian tourism, TravelNT, created a micro-site to advertise the merits of Alice Springs and its surrounding area in central Australia. I developed the main flash element appearing in those pages:

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I used Actionscript 3 to script the animation sequences and implement the interactivity. Many of the contents are loaded from external files, an XML file for the menu and text, FLV files for the videos and SWF files for slideshows. I was given the initial concept of the blurring transitions but felt that I had to experiment with the speeds and prioritizing the movements to achieve a smooth transition between the sub-pages.

Overall it was a small, useful app I enjoyed working on.

The core of the Tank A Day website is the water-saving quiz. Students are called to test their knowledge and gain the right for their school to win a water tank. This is the main purpose for the user registration and the other information that is available on the site…

(click here to visit the website)

I was called on this project for what seemed to be a simple upgrade – the addition of two age groups instead of just one. This led to a series of updates that ultimately changed the quiz to an unrecognized state. The new features where demanding but brought the experience to new standards visually. Unfortunately the old structure the quiz was still relying on (timelined AS2) couldn’t handle the new additions perfectly. Since there wasn’t any planning to create it from scratch in AS3 I tried to balance the opposing factors of the app to achieve the best possible results.

A kids site with a learning spin, Tank A Day uniquely entertains, educates on water saving and promotes the products of Bluescope. When the website was going to be upgraded I handled the front-end side.

(click here to visit the website)

The new interface has a basic XHTML-CSS structure. As always I tried to keep it as clean and obvious as possible. The new web 2.0 look gave me the freedom to actually apply some of the common CSS techniques. On the side there was also some flash development involved for the scroller in the homepage and some other elements in the administration area.

Worked on Journalspace to upgrade the profile pages with more interactive actions in order to make them easier to configure. Using AJAX a user can now move the mouse over the title bar of any of the boxes on their profile, click and drag to move its position, or delete the box with a click of a button having an immediate visual impact on the appearance the profile page.

(click here to visit the website)

The above image is part of the profile page where you can see two of the main features implemented – the drag n drop repositioning and the confirmation box to delete some content.

With this script you can load a number of RSS feeds and compile them into one RSS 2.0 file. Use it to present a mash-up of your news from different places (blogs, twitter etc.) or just present news from other sources around the Net.

Here is a sample of the RSS output, taken from our own network of websites.

This was a complete re-write for PHP 5 which has the SimpleXML extension that makes XML parsing a walk in the park. If you are still using PHP 4 though you can just use the older version.

Download the Script

Version: 1.2
Language: PHP
File size: 2,91kb