Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

Writing this I’m on the train heading north from Wexford to Dublin after having spent a couple of very relaxing days with my cousin Eoin, his wife Beth and their new baby boy.

Aside from having a great break to help slow down after a hectic Christmas schedule we also decided to redesign Beth’s business website Kavanagh Ensemble. A tall order given we had only a single day to do it!

Beth is a classically trained violin and viola player with experience playing in some of the top classical orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Now based in Wexford, she has launched an ensemble service for hire, perfect for weddings, corporate functions and recording sessions.

The only thing letting her down was her website. Officially I don’t do website development anymore, I’m concentrating on thedebs.ie and consulting for tech startups, but every now and again I’ll help someone out and set them up with a freebie. So, armed with a cup of tea and the last remaining tin of Christmas biscuits I went about building a new website for Beth and her exciting new business.

Time was limited so I decided to keep things simple. No point reinventing the wheel. I installed the latest copy of WordPress onto Beth’s hosting account and then together we went about choosing an existing theme that suited her needs.

After many searches on Google for things like “WordPress themes for musicians” we found a great theme called SimplePress by Elegant Themes.

Access to the theme cost $39. A small cost considering we received a fully ready to go WordPress theme in the exact style that Beth wanted, saving me days of coding. It also included a collection of shortcodes which act like widgets that can help structure the layout of each page.

Now that the theme was purchased and installed, we went about configuring it and adding content. Beth had had a number of photoshoots done in the past and already had plenty of content, so adding it all in was simply a cut and paste job.

Beth also had a large number of sample tracks in mp3 format which she wanted to make available so site visitors could listen to previous performances. Instead of spending time building an audio player I setup a free SoundCloud account. From there we uploaded all of the tracks. Once up on SoundCloud we were able to embed the tracks easily into the site using the WordPress SoundCloud plugin (although you don’t actually need this to embed the tracks – it just makes it easier).

And finally Beth wanted to display her full repertoire on the site. This is a long list of all the compositions that the Kavanagh Ensemble can play. Everything from pop to classical. Duos, trios and quartets. To list the repertoire easily I took advantage of another great WordPress plugin called WP-Table Reloaded. Here we were able to import the lists directly from Excel saving hours of time. The table plugin allowed the data to be sorted anyway the visitor wanted, searched, and automatically paginated the data.

And that was about it. Total time worked on the site was about 12 hours. Broken down as follows:

• WordPress install: 1 hour
• Theme search: 2 hours
• Theme install and configuration: 2 hours
• Photo prep and page creation: 3 hours
• Soundcloud Setup: 2 hours
• WP Table import and setup: 1 hour
• Final few checks incl. G. analytics: 1 hour

And here’s the end result: http://kavanagh-ensemble.com.

Just goes to show you can create a really great looking site in a single day using existing tools without having to write any code at all.

Twitter Perch is a new app that lets you automatically follow other Twitter folk that post about things you’re interested in. It’s a small app that was very simple to build and uses a combination of the Twitter API and the Twitter Search API to do it’s magic.

How To Use It

It’s really easy to use. Just enter your chosen keyword into the form on the homepage along with your Twitter username and password and Twitter Perch will then add new followers to your account every day, automatically growing your list.

The Rules

To put off spammers, we’re restricting the maximum number of new followers to 20 per day for each keyword. We’ll be carefully managing its use and will kick off anyone who abuses the service.

The Good News

We’ve also open sourced the code behind Twitter Perch so that others can run the service privately if they have security concerns or want to extend its features. The source code is hosted in a Google Code repository available here: http://code.google.com/p/twitterperch/

Best Intentions

I’ve launched this tool in the hope that it will be useful for businesses who want to track their brands and engage with people on Twitter. I think if it’s used properly then it will be a very useful extension of the Twitter Search features already available. However, if it’s used incorrectly it could reduce the value that Twitter provides to its users and potentially dilute the strong community bond that currently exists there.

So with that in mind, I urge people who want to try the service (online or on their own server) that they use it responsibly and in moderation.

HomeHealthClubs.com is a new business that brings all the benefits of a health club right into your living room. Together, with a few of your friends, you can enjoy evenings at home with an experienced health professional to help you with nutrition, exercise and motivation.

The site was built quickly and simply in just a few days. I took the chance to use some of jQuery’s more subtle plugins to render the rounded corners and equalise div column heights.

Any feedback on the design is greatly appreciated.

Fuel Efficiency for Your Fleet

ECOdrive is a new web application that helps to manage training sessions on driver fuel efficiency. Commissioned by Authentic Solutions Ltd, it stores information on a driver’s behaviour both before and after fuel efficiency training has been provided. It also measures the differences and provides the trainee with a certificate upon completion.

Good Clean Design

It’s got a pretty clean UI and includes a reverse pyramid menu so that the user always knows where they are within the hierarchy of the application.

The project took just two weeks to complete and is built on PHP and Smarty with a MySQL backend. It also makes use of the excellent FPDF utility for generating dynamic PDF documents.

Private Installation

The application was built exclusively for a single client and won’t be available to the public. For those who are interested in taking a closer look at what I do, I’m currently working on some other projects that will be released soon to the general public. I’ll post more about those in the next week or so.

If you want to find out more about what ECOdrive is, visit www.ecodrive.ie for loads of useful information.