<title>Web development</title>

Tools

My favorite tool for web development is Coda. This ingenious piece of software includes everything I need and more in a great interface. I've also used tools like Dreamweaver, TextMate, notepad++ and Expression web, but Coda is clearly my preferred tool for the time being.

CMS systems I know and use are Episerver, Wordpress, Joomla and the CMS's I've participated in developing (more below). For design I use PixelMator and LineForm, fast and cheap alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator.

Datanytt.no

Screenshot from archive.org From 2006 through 2007 I was a founding member of datanytt.no. This tech news site was started with some friends from school. Tom Andre and I coded a whole homegrown CMS from scratch. The website was written with a PHP backend on a LAMP stack.

Together with Tore, our designer and CEO, and three other journalists, we built what was one of the most read tech news sites in Norway at the time. With thousands of readers each day and an active forum we had our hands full.

We ran the site until the end of 2007 after we finished school, but had to close it due to lack of time when everyone went each to his own. Parts of the CMS lives on in Tegnelyst.no, detailed below.

Datanytt.no was awarded for "best website" in competition with other school-based startups both locally and nationally. In this competition we beat several professional websites built by web design companies, and took home a sizable prize. The juries consisted of (among others) experts from Yahoo and Oracle.

Databloggen.no

During the datanytt.no time we also started databloggen.no, a website for third party tech bloggers. I coded this site almost by myself reusing some code from datanytt.no Unfortunately we had to close datanytt.no and databloggen.no before the product went out of beta.

Tegnelyst.no

Tegnelyst.no is still up and running I have been involved in the developing and running of tegnelyst.no, Norway's biggest visual artists website. I've been less involved with this project than datanytt.no, and lately Tom Andre and his girlfriend have been running the site basically on their own.

The website has some really cool features I'd like to highlight, like a real time ajax-based chat and a homegrown CMS system. This website also run on LAMP, like all sites I've been involved with outside of work.

Inventory system

Inventory system In my current job I've redone the old MS Access inventory system in PHP+MySQL and transferred the database. The new system has got several new features and much better interface. I've implemented statistics, support for printing full inventory lists by person or room and full text search. The new system also supports zero click label scanning using usb label scanners.

Since the inventory system is for internal use only, I've not focused too much on design. I've used the district courts colors from our public website and tried to make it as functional as possible. The inventory system runs on an internal self hosted Linux server.

The server is virtualized and runs alongside with OCR software and poll software on the same hardware.

Thomassnielsen.com

This is my current website. I use it for my blogs (one in Norwegian and one in English), and any other project I feel like testing. For simpleness sake both blogs runs on Wordpress, with some customized design and code.

One little project I really like the outcome of is my web version of Mine Searcher. Mine Searcher is my iOS clone of Minesweeper. I sat down one weekend and ported the whole game from Objective C to javascript. Since most of the logic was written in pure C, it was ported almost without editing. The biggest challenge was the interface, which I coded in javascript with the jQuery and jQuery UI frameworks.

Because of speed and standards support issues this game seems to work best in webkit and Gecho browsers, although I've seen it run usably well on even older versions of IE.

The CMS

I've developed another (aside from datanytt.no) fully functional CMS from scratch. The CMS is written in PHP, and is written for speed and flexibility. I've never quite finished the CMS. The biggest challenge was making all the needed modules to make it work for my needs. I finally ended up going with Wordpress and hand coded html for my own websites for now.

The CMS has a tiny core that displays content according to a theme, and relies on plugins to display each type of content. The basic plugins are working, like image, text from database and text from a wysiwyg editor (tinyMCE).

While I'm quite satisfied with my work on a conceptual level, there are too many deeply rooted functionality flaws for this CMS to be usable on a large scale. I know how to fix them, but it would mean rewriting the whole CMS core and most of the plugins. This is simply too much work to be worth it, especially since there are so many other good CMS solutions available.

Other websites

During my apprenticeship I did two notable web projects. The first was an interface redesign on the web GUI for our CRM. The changes was mainly rebranding and redesigning the UI for end users. I learnt a lot about Internet Explorer 6 CSS quirks and ASP (Visual Basic) backend.

The second project was a website made for displaying updated pictures from six webcams spread throughout the county. The biggest challenge was finding a usable way to update the images from the webcams. We had to move the pictures from the webcams which were behind the firewall to a web server in a DMZ.

I coded both the VB and batch scripts that did the file moving and the website interface. We also saved pictures at a given interval to make a time lapse video.