Jonathan Harris

Unbored is a project that my friend Jack Clarkson thought up. With both of us finding it hard to find work after finishing university, we teamed up and to create Unbored. Unbored is a reviews site, staff by 8 ( at time of writing November 2009) and has geek related content.

The site is based on the firm basis of Wordpress, but as much of the site’s functionality needed to be added using verbose scripts. Within the theme, the functions.php file has over 1000 lines of code, adding functions such as “postimage” that collects the first image assigned to a post and displays it as a thumbnail. Also new fields in the user profiles such as short description and twitter id.

These additions to the CMS, make it completely remote manageable, with the admins of the site needing little of any coding knowledge to change the styling and content of the site from within the Wordpress admin panel.

This site is one of discussion, promoting the users to comment on any post. The site is also integrated into social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This means that users can interact with the site in and number of ways and receive updates on the social networking site of their choice.

I remain an active part of the development of the site, with new features being added on a weekly basis. The site hopes to add a new discussion forum, that has a unified login, enabling users to have one login for comments and the forum.

Profiles is a small accounting firm based in Southsea Portsmouth. The owner of the company hired me to increase her customer base with a series of promotions. I was tasked with branding the company and new logo, which was created in Photoshop to be used in all print work and bussiness cards. This website was also a push to inform future customers of the services that the company provides and a method of getting in contact. The website is power by wordpress, which makes it extremely easy for the owner to add new content and update pages.  This site is current administratored and hosted by me, leaving all the techinical worried out of the customers hands leaving them with a professional looking website.

This system was developed for my final year project at the University of Portsmouth for which I received a first. The brief was to build a secure multi-user  content management system, that would enable the university’s lecturers to create posts and upload content (much like a blog) to the electronics department intranet site. Posts can be organized with a series of meta data such as post date, category, unit, keywords and author. Each lecturer has a user, which has assigned access rights to create posts for only units that they teach and each user has the ability to administrate multiple units. Each post is assigned to a unit and will only appear on that unit’s page. Each post can also have multiple attachments, which can be PDF documents or PowerPoint slides. Lectures could even upload media files such as MP3 which can be outputted a podcast.

The CMS has a three level user login system. The first user level the technical administrator, who can edit settings and oversee the backend, but not add new content. The two other levels can add content, with a limited number of senior lecturers, being able to edit anyone’s posts. Each level has different rights to access the data stored in the database. Most users will be junior level lecturers.

The content of this CMS is outputted to students on the ECE intranet, which I also developed.

This website was designed for students to receive updates from lecturers on the units that they are studing. This site is the student facing side of the lecture driven CMS. This web site is designed to replace an already existing site, that is currently not database driven but static html pages. Each unit in the department has it’s own unit page, which acts much like a blog, with a stream of the latest updates. This redesign makes the site more dynamic by linking information together for example the author of a post has a link to their profile page.

Students can keep up today with updates by subscribing to each unit’s RSS feed. Students can even filter down to category level of each post and only subscribe to post of category that they are interesting in, e.g. Lab notes for Unit B356. The system has a mechanism for caching of feeds, as this cuts down the server load because RSS feeds can be resource intensive applications as they perform many queries on the database.

The web interface is rich user experience and follows the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

DIP-SNAP (DIstributed Portsmouth Social Networking APplication) is a social networking site  with the aim to provide a simple way for people to communicate with each other and make new friends. The DIP-SNAP owners wanted the system to consist of two main components, a client and a server. The client is a web application will provide users with a web interface to the social networking site which users will be able to access via their web browsers. The server is the backbone of the system and stores the user profiles and passes information between users. Multiple servers were used which will allow the system to cope with heavy processing load and crashes on individual servers.

The system was written using Java and RMI so that each server could be run on any platform. The Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) system allows an object running in one Java virtual machine to invoke methods on an object running in another Java virtual machine. RMI provides for remote communication between programs written in the Java programming language.Each server communicated with each, keeping different MySQL servers up to date with each other. The system used a system of locks to mean that the data wasn’t overwritten. New servers could be added, easily, with new servers automatically getting a copy of the database installed.