Darren Stuart's random stuff

Crowdstatus update

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:24:32 -0400

Last night I updated http://crowdstatus.com with a few new features

Crowds ordered by latest statuses
Auto refresh for crowds can be turned on and off
a sprinkle of ajax
a future feature peak a twitter client @ http://crowdstatus.com/twitter.aspx

more to come in the following weeks… also I want to find time for my music app called songs and me, I won’t give any more details until I have a working first draft up…

another project has the dust sheets taken off

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:07:35 -0400

I created a new app called crowdstatus.com

Basically its a place for keeping all the people that you follow and filter out the others. It only supports twitter statuses at the moment and I plan to add more soon.

If you have any suggestions get in touch.

nothing to see here....

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:13:46 -0400

Nothing much to report at the moment.

http://justaddme.com - working on version 2 and aiming for a realise very soon….

http://diystartupnews.com - seems to be picking up a bit of momentum and Tony is doing an awesome job of being the editor.

My CMS is going great, I am now working on version 2 which should be ready for Aprl. I am still trying to find a name for it as I have decided to build another product for the updatable pages domain (yet another CMS but with a difference).

D.I.Y. Startup news got nominated for the next web awards

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:11:49 -0400

http://diystartupnews.com/ has been shortlisted for the next web awards.

You can vote for it at the site http://awards.thenextweb.org/categories/view/16

Now I am off to get the voting badge for it :D

Stuff and things again

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:03:15 -0400

Really stuck between a rock and a hard place with the amount of projects to work on. justaddme.com is coming along but I am fighting the urge to work on 5 other projects!

I won’t go into detail on them but I think they are all goers if I have time to spend on them.

I guess I need to write a list and compare them and figure out which order to do them in.

CMS news

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:58:26 -0400

I have finally released version 1 of my CMS to some of my clients.

I have to build a version with ecommerce in april so I can sell it to the public at large.

I am currently working on a template system for the email form handler so users can design their own emails using the template system and have these connected to plain html forms on their site. The page editor makes it easy to build forms already and this enhancement will add to this.

Also on the list for version 1.1 are

content templates

and user management

I killed user management for version 1.0 because I needed to release it for clients to use. Also I had to build in a licencing system which I felt was more important. All versions now have a 30 day trial option and full blown version locked to a domain name so no one can steal it.

stuff and things part (N)

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:51:05 -0500

well sold a fair few CMS’s so I seem to have the price right.

Working on http://justaddme.com next version

Just ripped out the widget creation code and replaced it with some oop code and made it a much easier task to add features to it now. I choose to take the pain now because it would of taken me about 10 times longer to add these updates that I am working on now.

I have added a few more fields and below is a list of all of em

name
location
occupation
miniBio
website
twitter
linkedin
technorati
flickr
mySpace
ning
facebook
digg
rss
steam
xbox
xfire
stumbleUpon
delicious
lastFM
friendFeed
mashable
mahalo
youTube
myBlogLog
reddit
pownce

As you can see there are a load of new sites etc, They are now categorised into Profile page, Social sites, life streaming, social bookingmarking/news, gamer sites and misc

There will be a widget for each of these categories and a couple of new ones for all of them. Also I am adding a profile page for each user that will do something I don’t thing I have seen out there yet so I will keep it as a suprise.

Oh well back to it.

Testing 123...

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:01:00 -0500

I have just updated justaddme.com

I have added a slimline version, a forum version, a html version for when iframes don’t work.

I would add the html version here but it appears that tumblr removes markup!

CMS and things

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:20:36 -0500

This week I have nailed down the first version of my CMS and come up with a pricing plan. I have decided to start at £100 for the basic CMS and extras for addons. The reason for this is for most web designers the basic version is all that is needed to add cms to a static site. The addons’ won’t cost to much for simple ones like news and form builder but the price goes up for more complicated ones. I will post a list of them an their prices once I have tested the addon system. I have a couple of meetings this week to show it off but the initial feedback has been positive.

I am aiming to get the CMS out of beta and to RC1 this week, I then have to create a site to sell it on but that shouldn’t be to hard as I am using my CMS to build it :P

Just designing my next project next. going to be a fun app next weekend I think.

I have had some good feedback on http://justaddme.com so will be making some updates this week when I find some time.

I have just launched JustAddMe.com

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:05:57 -0500

Its a social website widget where people can add all their info for various sites like twitter, digg and facebook etc.

I need to get a couple of people to test it so please feel free to give it a go.

http://justaddme.com

Launched at last

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:43:43 -0500

Today I finally launched my wordpress powered UGC site. check it out at

http://diystartupnews.com/

stuff and things again

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:52:14 -0500

Still building my CMS, have made some design changes which will make the speed of content as fast as it can be. It will generate html files now instead of rendering them by building the page out. The reason behind this is because I plan on offering a hosted version which will host the admin side and ftp the published site to the web designers current hosting. However thats a while away yet. Just need to get version 1 complete.

I am also very close on a couple of other sites…. arrggg to many site ideas and not enough time :p

Building a product to sell

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:56:00 -0500

I am working on a CMS for web designers with zero coding needed or database work.

It’s target market is designers that know xhtml and css.

I have built the page renderer and file system out and now am working on the admin interface and email form hanlder and I am ready with a beta.

The best thing about it was once I had built out the functionality I tested it by dropping in my stuartmedia html and it worked with no errors. I am really proud of the code behind the renderer. 120 odd lines of code which will not break ever :p

The only requirements is a web host that supports asp.net 2.0.

How it works

The designer marks up their design.

They drop my cms files onto their hosting

They create the templates using the admin area and drop their html into it.

The templates are made up of 2 parts head and body content

Inside the body there are 2 custom tags, 1 for page content and 1 for navigation.

They can then add pages, each page has a docType, title, template and content.

They can choose to ignore the nav and just have their own hard coded one in template or they can use the navigation wizard to build out the nav using html.

The admin area will be able to be styled using css so they can brand it with no problem.

Thats it. oh and its damn quick too.

If you want a stupid simple CMS that does not get in the way and involves zero code, easy for clients to use and has a built in formhandler for email forms then stay tuned.

Future features will be a news, galleries, rss, catelogue, paypal, and some more settings around the content editor and uploading.

I will call it updateable pages.

now I need to find a good price point.

playing with Sprout

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:19:47 -0500

playing with Sprout

Playing with wordless diagrams

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:10 -0500

Playing with wordless diagrams

what happens when I get fireworks out and doodle.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:29:12 -0500

what happens when I get fireworks out and doodle.

Best laid plans and all that

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:36:16 -0500

well after a week of doing odds and sods work wise I think this week will be better and I should hopefully get some projects done.

nearly finished a wordpress project for a friend which was real interesting. I really enjoyed getting back into hacking up wordpress themes. My only complaint about wordpress is some of the functions give you back formatted html and the functions themselves are quite cryptic.

so this week, I have 2 sites to build in wordpress and 1 to build in bbpress and also 1 asp.net site and a brochure site with blog… busy week then :p

nothing to see here

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:17:41 -0500

well if anyone is reading this I am nearly there on a couple of projects and will start annoucing stuff next week.

how to get ClearType with firefox

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:12:23 -0500

Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance tab -> Effects button -> Check “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts” -> Set ClearType in the drop-down

nothing to see here

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:24:41 -0500

Nothing much going on today, Did some business admin and played with an idea I have for a music related site. Tonight I am going to work on one of my ideas that will make me money as soon as I have it working IE I can sell it to my current clients…

Really enjoying twitter at the moment just have to get more people to follow and get some feckers to follow me…