In a textbook case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot, I realised today that I haven’t had time to touch the Hogtown website in months (beyond the occasional blog post). Now that’s changed, I’ve just given the portfolio page a minor makeover and added some interesting recent projects.

I won’t reprint it all here, but there is one project I haven’t mentioned which I’m particularly proud of. At the height of the re-design of the Eye Weekly website it was mentioned that Eye would really like to have something more dynamic for the website to highlight the Toronto Fringe Festival. In just under two weeks I built them a Fringe micro-site, based on a modified version of WordPress.

I wish I’d had more time to perfect it, but overall the Fringe site was a huge success. It allowed the Arts Editor to post reviews of every one of the 100+ Fringe shows within 24 hours of their first run. Also, and this was the cool bit in my opinion, it allowed visitors to the site to leave their own reviews of the shows. The site attracted huge numbers of pageviews, almost as many as the Eye Weekly homepage which is no 100lb weakling, and received 1,000+ user submitted reviews in the 10 days the Fringe runs for.

I was really pleased to see the Fringe micro-site do so well, as this type of web-specific, participatory media is something we need to see much, much more of.