About Me

I live in South London, England and work mostly in and around London.

What I do

I build Web Sites, talk about Web Development and Design practices. I've worked in various different capacities, but mostly as Senior Web Developer

The majority of my time working in IT has been focused on front end web development. These days: ASP.Net (Web forms and MVC), Javascript (AJAX), XML, XSLT, CSS and obviously HTML are my everyday tools and most of the sites and applications I have worked on have been backed by a SQL server database or two and more recenlty in an SOA environment.

Although my experience is primarily Microsoft focused on the server side this does not mean that I'm not a keen practitioner of open source environments and software including different Javascript frameworks including jQuery and ExtJS.

How I like to work

When I'm freelancing I work on fixed price contracts and on daily rate contracts and have done for several years. I'm happy to consult or get my hands dirty and prefer to working in agile, creative environments.

I'd like to work with some of the leading talent in the UK to produce creative, well designed web sites and applications.

Blog

Currently My Blog resides on Wordpress and gets updated when I get the chance. You can find the following articles there currently ...

• iTunes 5103 ? delete your SC Info folder

  Just got this whilst trying to play an iTunes rental – 5103: This was the solution: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1389   Filed under: Apple, iphone, iTunes, MacBook Tagged: Apple, itunes, solution, support

• Class and Object definitions in JavaScript

  A developer friend of mine emailed me with a question about Classes in Javascript: Don’t suppose you have any literature or anything I can look at in regards to the correct structure for a javascript class (in node.js)? I have looked all over the shop and found various different ways of doing it but am having [...]

• A simple jQuery Plugin to automagically create anchors from recognised HTTP links and convert hash tags into links on Twitter

  Linkify (and Hashify) A simple jQuery Plugin to automagically create anchors from recognised HTTP links and convert hash tags into links to Twitter. Get the code on github. I created linkify after using the @anywhere Twitter library and found that it didn’t automatically link urls in tweets or hash tags. Usage $([selector]).linkify();  / $([selector]).hashify(); Examples [...]

• Interesting content, it makes work less ‘work like’!

  www.grundini.com I just finished working on the first release of this website (above) for Peter Grundy, with Further Creative http://www.furthercreative.co.uk. After discussing with the user experience expert and designer, I  faced the usual development decisions. I chose some solutions which use technology that I’d not employed in anger on many projects before. With Peter’s content [...]

• Creating ShareThis buttons with custom images in Javascript

  This should have been easy! I wanted to add some ShareThis buttons on a page in an single page web application and update the link to be shared every time the hash was changed. The shareThis functionality didn’t really allow this ‘out of the box’ and it took me a while to work out the [...]

• My Twitter Flickr Mashup

  I attended full frontal last week, which was excellent. It gave me inspiration to experiment a bit with some Javascript. I went about setting myself a very loose brief; I wanted to do something quick, in no more than seven hours, I didn't want to have to write any server side code and wanted the code to reside on a single page. I went about looking into the Twitter and Flickr APIs and decided to combine them by doing a photo search on flickr using tweets from the Twitter public timeline every 60 seconds. What I came up with ended up as a kind of visual social commentary using Twitter and flickr.

• Javascript League Tables

  Having seen a lot of league tables on various websites I was suprised to not see the implementations use the UI more effectively. Most of the implementations required the user to click on seperate links to view the current table, results or fixtures. I was interested to see if I could provide an easier way [...]

• ExtJs stores and baseParams

  I have found myself using ExtJS on both of the last two contracts I have worked on. I have found that the API documentation, however well organised, doesn’t suit me. Finding examples that are  specifically what you need can be a difficult task as they tend not to exist in the documentation itself but are [...]

• MacBook Pro Trackpad and Keyboard not Working?

  I was sat at the airport the other week with very little to do. I turned on my 13 and  a half month old (that’s one and half months out of warranty I believe, around 45 days) MacBook Pro , that I love and has been working perfectly since I purchased it and I couldn’t [...]

• Unit Testing with xUnit and ReSharper

  In this Post: The xUnit unit testing Framework ReSharper, .Net code productivity tool I’ve just started using the xUnit framework, and inherently the xUnit approach as a unit testing framework within .Net. For the purpose of this post and to avoid confusion when I say xUnit, I’m talking specifically about the framework! I’m using ReSharper [...]