I did a quick job recently for photographer and ex-tutor Pedro Ramos, creating a Tumblr theme from scratch. Pedro already had a theme (Narnia) he was using but found he couldn’t customise it to his needs on his own – it was also Javascript-dependant and not compatible with older browsers. So over the course of a few days I whipped up this.

While I’ve worked with templating using a number of languages I’ve never dabbled too far into Tumblr before, but thanks to the site’s intuitive templating style and the ever-helpful LESS it wasn’t too hard to put something together in the short timeline. While the site looks its best with Javascript enabled, it still works without it and on all the dominant browsers, including iOS support.

• Client: Pedro Ramos

• Tech: CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, LESS, Tumblr

After going through a complete redesign, I’m happy to say that the new version of Locongo has gone live. It’s been a big job and it’s good to see it finally come together. The site is still a closed beta at the moment but if you’re quick, you may be able to snag an account by signing up with this access code: LCHK89.

It won’t be too long till we’ll be taking the site public, using the EventBrite API to support the booking system until the site is ready for PayPal.

• Client: Locongo

• Tech: CakePHP, CSS3, HTML5, ImageMagick, JavaScript, LESS, MySQL, PHP

I’ve just put makeup artist/hair stylist Abbey Love‘s new holding page online. The design is a modified version of what will be the final site’s navigation section, something which we’ve put a lot of work into refining. We’ve put this new page up as a means to put Abbey’s work on display while development continues – not quite a portfolio, but it certainly makes a better impression than the single-image page from before. Very much look forward to bringing it out in the next few weeks!

From a technical standpoint, the site should work in any half-capable browser – gracefully degrading should “sugar” features such as Javascript and CSS3 be disabled. Photography credits go once again to wedding photographer Matt Sacco.

• Tech: Adobe Photoshop CS5, CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, LESS

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I recently started working from Vibewire, an enterprise hub in Sydney. Until now I’ve had to work from home – anybody who’s freelanced before will know this isn’t ideal, and maintaining the separation of life and work for a freelancer is an issue often overlooked when starting out. Vibewire holds regular design events and is home to a number of creative and social enterprises, including Major Raiser and Pozible.

Have started working on a hackish “robot” for a university exhibition coming up too. It’ll move around the space taking photos of guests and posting them to its personal Twitter/Tumblr/Flickr accounts. I’ll be running the logic using Node, Processing and an Arduino board, which I’ve found to be great for rapid prototyping work with web, graphics and hardware respectively. More on that later though.

Conway’s Collaborative Game of Life just won the first NowJS Realtime Trials competition, one of the prizes being twelve months hosting with DotCloud Pro. I’ll be moving my personal projects over to their servers soon, so this site and my experiments should be running much more smoothly from here on.

For an upcoming project, I’m planning to write a web application using Node.JS. The big problem with this of course is that if I were to start now, I would be building the project with little-to-no experience using Node. So for the sake of a learning experience, I put together this small collaborative “game” (well, toy) using Node and a library called NowJS.

Conway’s Collaborative Game of Life follows all the same rules as the original. However, here players have to work together on the same grid. That’s the part I’m using NowJS for: if somebody makes a change on one computer everybody else can see it almost instantly (this depends on how fast their internet connection is of course). The goal of the game is to keep the population count above five percent as long as possible by adding/removing cells so that they survive onto the next generation.

Anyway, don’t hesitate to try it out! You can check out the source code too, although it’s pretty messy. For those of you who don’t know what Conway’s Game of Life is, it’s probably the (relatively speaking) most well known Cellular Automaton, you can read up on it at Wikipedia.

• Tech: CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, LESS, Node.JS