I've been out of the loop for a fair while now, after getting married, I decided to take a break from blogging and working on some new and interesting stuff, read on to see what's in the pipeline for this year.
Ongoing Projects
M2 Content Management System
M2 is a PHP/Javascript based
Content Management Solution
Aimed at mid to high end websites.
It's main feature is direct inline
content editing.
Snatch (Mac OS X)
Snatch is a website scraping
tool which can be used to
retrieve links, images and email
addresses from a given webpage
and linked pages.
Distribution (Mac OS X)
Distributions is a mailing list
management tool for Mac OS X.
It features support for Multiple
Classifications and some CRM
functions.
??? (Mac OS X)
This is a new project I am
working on for OS X (leopard).
more soon!
A/B testing can be used to dramically increase conversions on your e-commerce site. Here is basic overview.
New things ahead
M2 has arrived
I've finally finished the latest version of Microcyte, which will hence-forth been known as M2. M2 is a ground up re-write of Microcyte, a total lessons learned rebuild. M2 takes a fundamentally different approach from Microcyte to content management. Pretty much the only similarity between the two systems in the in place editing UI paradigm. M2 is aimed at a much higher level from the original Microcyte which was designed for relatively small sites. M2 will easily work well with sites of hundreds of pages with a wide variety of content types. It supports:
CMS Plugins
Flash video
Dynamically resizable images
Template includes
Site wide editable areas (template-level editable areas)
CMS level form control
CMS managed memberships (members areas)
Many, many more features
If you want to find out a little more about M2 you can visit its very own web page on my new upcoming company website when that website in launched, I'll post that link soon. All of this brings me neatly to my next item of news:
Lucid Digital Media
Thats right! I've left Magic Online Solutions and I am now running my own web development company Lucid Digital Media. The website will be coming soon with much more information. For now let me say that I will be working on all levels of websites, focussing mainly on the technical side (back-office integrations, advanced browser applications, CMS systems, etc) andwhere required providing general consultancy drawn from my vast amount of knowledge in high-end e-commerce systems.
I'll still be working very much with other freelancers to help them complete their projects, but I'll also have some good backing and will be looking to tackle larger projects end-to-end. In addition, I'll be looking to license my new M2 CMS to people who are interested in using it.
Raphael JS library
Something else I've been working with a lot recently is the relatively new Raphael javascript library for manipulating VML and SVG. This library helps to provide Flash like functionality directly in the browser and I've found it to be an interesting and useful tool. I'll be writing a small article about that soon with a case study on the Lucid Digital Media site about a flow charting application I've recently completed.
Well, thats it for now, hopefully you'll be seeing a lot more posts from me going forward now that this is going to be part of my day job!
