Software Development

You have already heard about the DrawShield suite of programs, a world-leading set of tools for heraldic art has at its heart a large (10,000+ line) PHP program, which is called via AJAX from JavaScript embedded within WordPress pages. The program was featured in a “Family History” magazine article and described as “very clever”. Links to the site and a bit of background are in the menu above.

Being short of friends and wanting to have someone to talk to I have implemented an AIML interpreter (AI Markup Language) for conversational “bots” in PHP including an innovative and compact data structure for the “brain” that can used in stateless HTTP transactions with very little overhead. But then I got an Amazon Echo and this became another part finished project…

Web Site Development

I have completed several website developments for commercial clients, largely using WordPress. I have impemented commercial themes, developed custom themes for clients and also written a plug-in to integrate PayPal with an on-line purchasing system.

The DrawShield website itself (a very large 20,000+ page site) uses a custom written theme for the Jekyll static site generator along with a quite complicated build system with tooling written in PHP and managed by Rake.

Graphic Design

During the course of other developments I’ve also needed to do a bit of graphic design, which I have enjoyed. The gallery below showcases some examples of the things I have created.

Graphics Programming

Being at heart a programmer, my work on 3D graphics is sometimes sid-tracked into something that looks a lot like a program! (Hence my work in Pov-Ray, which is all program!) Even Blender has a very rich node based system which I have tried out – the image here is an entirely algorithmic node-based texture, with NO photographic images or textures involved at all.