Typically the arrival of an About Me page wouldn’t rate a blog post. But as I’ve been intending to get around to creating one for Hogtown for about two years now this is a marginally special day.

Here it is in all its expositional glory: about me.

I’m certainly not the first to write about now being a good time to be in the business of doing things on the web, here’s the 37 Signals take on it. There are a bunch of reasons this is true, but here’s one that I’ve found really relevant: open source software rocks!

Perhaps I should expand on that a little. As a one man web development/consulting shop I have a finite amount of time in a given week to get things done. The availability of good quality software components that are free and freely customisable is a huge bonus when I’m trying to make the most of my time, which is why I love open source.

Right now I’m developing a site for a non-profit who are working with Cisco to provide technology for post-Katrina redevelopment of schools on the Gulf Coast. The site spec called for forum and photo gallery systems. Now I could have written them from scratch, but it would have taken me a long time, or I could have bought them off the shelf, but likely the products would have cost a lot or just not been quite right. Open source to the rescue, after a little searching I found projects that provided exactly what I needed, and because they’re open source I can tweak the code to get them working exactly the way I want.

This is great, I don’t want to spend my time re-inventing the wheel in developing what’s already been done, I want to create great stuff on the web. So I can concentrate on the stuff I really love doing because there’s a huge number of great tools out there that I can plug together and alter as I need to. And the price tag of zero dollars (plus the occasional donation to the projects) can’t be beat either.

I’m pleased to announce that one of Hogtown Consulting’s biggest projects to date is now live. A couple of weeks ago the Eye Weekly website was re-launched, and I was proud to have a significant part in that.

The layout and visual concept of the site was the work of Tim Emery, of Visible Media, who produced a really nice looking design under incredibly tight timelines. Pretty much everything else about the development of the site was my work, from coding the templates and migrating 10,000+ archive stories to designing and implementing the workflow process used for updating the website every week.

Overall I’m really happy with the site, as always with a new website there are some niggling problems to work out and some pieces I’d have done slightly differently with the benefit of hindsight. I think it turned out really well, particularly considering the extremely tight timelines, 2 months from first meeting to live.

More importantly that what I think, it seems like the Eye Weekly team are really happy too. The main goals were to modernise the website while providing a platform for some interesting developments in the near future, and those goals have been achieved. Stay tuned for phase 1.1.

According to the Top Ten Promising Small Business Opportunities for 2006 post on the Small Business Trends blog the number 1 business trend for for 2006 will be Outsourced information technology services. That’s good for me, offering as I do web technology outsourcing for small businesses.
read more…