Client: Various
Date: October 1, 2015
Categories: Website
Besides making android apps, I also make, manage and tweak websites.
ampers
This is a networked WordPress site using a modified version of the free theme TA Portfolio. Some of the tweaks I have made to this theme is: adjusted the colours, set some fields not to display the titles if they are blank, hide the feature image on blog posts, adjusted the profile page layout and added in a jQuery timeline run off a Google doc on the home page.
I also use this site as a testing and staging area for other sites I am working on.
Because I am cheap, I am running this on a free hosting service and I haven’t bought a proper domain name. However, I have resisted a few domain names that point back here, just because they were free. These include: ampers.cf, ampers.ga, ampers.gq, ampers.ml and ampers.tk.
Canberra Christian Conventions
canberrachristianconventions.org.au
This is also a networked WordPress site. Each conference arm have their own “site”, which means they can have their own users and style. For branding consistency, it is agreed that each site will use the same theme and have the same top menu at the top. Each group then run the same theme, but they can adjust their accent colours and images to suit their needs.
While The7 is a popular and flexible theme, it still wouldn’t easily do what we wanted for the homepage, so I coded that myself. The home page has three main responsive stages to help fit on different screens. The idea for the homepage is to get people off this homepage to go where they want. I tried to mimic their nav for desktop and mobile, while also using as little styles or JavaScript as possible.
I also have adjusted the sermon browser plugin to fit more for conferences than for weekly sermons and made a resource page that lists our talks like a series of albums.
New City Catechism for mobile
This was kind of a protest site, because the official site was not mobile friendly.
Originally I wrote a php script that scraped the official site’s html (link goes to an older version of the script), adjusted the formatting and then produce a file for each question. From that output, I then put those pages into a GetSimple CMS running the myCompany theme. The HTML output was also used as the basis for the New City Catechism android app.
On the getSimple site, for the main adult, child and Spanish pages it uses the DynPages plugin to work out the week of the year and then redirects to the correct question.
I have been in discussions with The Gospel Coalition about a new version of the NCC website, but nothing has come about it.
Mobile multiply
Like the New City Catechism site this was made because the official site was not mobile friendly. They have since updated their site to be responsive, so I am wondering if this site still needs to exist.
This site is also running on the GetSimple CMS. GetSimple is good in that it doesn’t need a database to display its content and it quite quick and easy.
Over the top of each page Reftagger is running, which means any Bible references are automatically hyperlinked.
Australian Daily Prayer
This site I built from scratch, using the Anglican church of Australia‘s website as a theme template (although my site is responsive). It doesn’t use a database, but is mostly run off XML files. Instructions on how to use this site on your own page and the XML files it uses can be downloaded here.
There is a ‘clean‘ page that can be embedded anywhere you like, which will display the contents minus the theme’s header and footer. This is what the Australian Daily Prayer android app displays. It is also listed in the Open Prayer Book android app. This ‘clean’ page gets about six times as many hits as the main page.
When the page is first hit for the day, it runs off and gets the ESV Bible text from the ESV API. The daily text is then cached locally to improve performance. Since this is running on my free hosting account, sometimes when it is fetching data it is quite slow. So, if the response is talking too long, it then send the request to a mirrored site I have running on my openShift account at: http://dailyprayer-ampers.rhcloud.com which will then send back the ESV and JSON data for populating the page.
Ravings and Ranting
ravingsandranting.blogspot.com
This is my personal blog on Blogger. My previous theme that I was running was quite complex and technical (for a Blogger theme) with sliders, news tickers and viewing by list or thumbnail options (I think it was based on the Sevida theme). Blogger doesn’t really have that much flexibility, so all these were workarounds on top of the system. Anyway, that theme was too “busy”, my new theme is a slight modification on the Bushwick theme. It is quite scaled back and basic.
This ampers site is also trying to be scaled back. I think this is the direction more sites are going, and I am not complaining. Just present your content, with less distractions.
WatersEdge @ Googong
This is a simple wordpress site for a new community of faith. We paid $25 (for 2 years) for a .org and .com and $5 for hosting (per year) which is perfect for a small time church group. Most of the advertising they do is via flyers, but as the new development grows it is good to have some sort of Internet presence so people can see what else this group is up to. The site really is an events list with the occasional update. I have set up an IFTTT rule so that if there is a site update it will automatically post to facebook and twitter.
Body@Work Physiotherapy
bodyatworkphysiotherapy.com.au
I made this WordPress site for a small business around June 2014. It is using the free Invert Lite theme. In September 2015 the client got back to me with some more changes that they wanted. This involved extending the theme to deal with more icons on the homepage, inserting meta data at the top of each page, adjusting the responsiveness of the theme to better jump to different screen sizes, restructuring the site to be simpler and improving the contact us map so that the mouse wheel didn’t get caught in it.