Work Now

Over the past few years my work has changed from that on an IT Contractor doing work at a client site, to working from home. I've also moved away from C/Unix programming to web development - using LAMP - Linux, Apache, Mysql and PhP (or Perl, if required).

I work for a friend who has built up a successful set of websites, and am also working on some of my own projects - which I hope will be successful in their own right! With the arrival of a baby, my cirumstances have changed during 2006 - I have been lucky enough to continue to work from home, so have seen my daughter every day - and I am to be a stay-at-home-dad, working part time on web development, and the rest of the time looking after our daughter.

Current websites and projects include:

• Beer Wine Online - a website to help you buy beer, wine and Champagne, Whisky and spirits, plus loads of alcohol related gifts and gadgets. With an ever increasing collection of drinks and accessories, currently over 5000, this aims to be one of the best resources on the web for those looking to buy a tipple or two.
• Review What You Eat - a UK based site for details of restaurants, pubs, cafes and takeaways organised by county (England and Northern Ireland), or region (Scotland and Wales). Visitors can see details of the eatery, read reviews, and add reviews. New features will be added - including adding new establishments, and enhanced details of places to eat. I like eating out, and it's always good to find somewhere new to eat which you can recommend to other people - and to know where to avoid! Many of the existing review sites as specific to the larger towns (London, Birmingham, Manchester etc.), so I thought I'd do one for the whole of the UK - with a hope to encourage places in smaller towns to get listed. Recently enhanced to include Google Maps for restautant locations, and linked into an online table booking system for restaurants.
• UpperCrusts Catering - a website for a local catering company who bake home made cakes and tray bakes for wholesale in and around Cambridge. And their cakes are great, I ate a fair few of them after the photograph session! It's been doing well in the search engines too - keeping it simple seemed to work well.
• Activity Days Direct - a site developed for Grand Adventures Limited (GAL), to allow people who operate activity days (driving experiences, spa days, that sort of thing) on a relatively small scale to advertise their products with minimal cost. Technically speaking it's a pay per click advertising site, with a CMS system for the activity day suppliers, and an admin system for GAL.
• Wilburton Beer Festival - a site for the Wilburton Beer Festival, being in the village where I live. It's a fantastic weekend, and a very popular event - we have a good choice of beers and live music throughout the event - plus food and childrens activities, and all money raised goes to charities and local organisations. The website itself is built on a MySQL database, so the entries for the previous years are available, and a new year is easy to add.
• Say No To Mereham - our village is small, with a good community - but this has been threatened several times but greedy developers using the "Cambridge phenomenon" as an excuse to try to build thousands of houses nearby, effectivly making Wilburton and Stretham suburbs of a horrible (as in ugly, very ugly) new town. Luckily local government see the problems associated with this proposal (something the developers are stangely blinded to) - and it has been thrown out lots of times. The only thing to allow it to go ahead would be a very poor and uninformed decision from central Government - lets just hope that doesn't happen. Besides, we are too far away from Cambridge to provide suitable housing - something that the developers don't seem to know (it's more than 10km, in fact it's more than 10 miles...).

Future projects - well, there are a few being developed, but I don't want to give anything away just yet!