Code Samples
A mixture of code released to provide samples of my work, or for public use. Most of the below are very simple examples, or merely snippets. If you want more extensive samples, please email me.
loads_from_amazon (Ruby on Rails plugin)
A Ruby on Rails plugin that acts as an ActiveRecord Mixin, working with the Ruby/Amazon library to let you populate an ActiveRecord object with the details of a product listed on amazon.
XML Syndication Feed Parser (PHP)
Based on the model of the excellent Universal Feed Parser (for python) this package seeks to provide (as far as possible) a unified API for working with the various XML Syndication formats (Atom, RSS1, RSS2, etc).
Fading Javascript Gallery
Using javascript to display photo galleries is an increasingly popular technique. This code provides for smart transitions between images in such a gallery, by 'sliding' and 'fading' between images, giving a smooth and pleasing display.
MTPastEntries Movable Type Plugin (Perl and PHP)
As part of my involvement with a project to increase discussion around public documents (government consultations, constitutions, etc) we needed a facility to allow for revisions of an article to include details of comments made on previous versions. I developed this plugin for Movable Type, a popular blogging system and one of our key tools, to provide that functionality.
Technorati API Implementation (PHP)
Technorati is a search engine for blogs. It provides users with ways to search for blogs, see who is linking to whom, and which blogs are owned by which writers. This module provides tools for PHP programmers who want to make use of the Technorati 'API' to use technorati data on their own website.
Bed, Bath & Beyond Screen Scraper (Python)
When developing the website for our wedding we wanted to combine the various registries we held in one page, so as to make the experience for those who wished to buy a gift as simple as possible. In order to achieve this it was necessary to write "screen-scraper" scripts that extracted the relevant data from the retailers' websites. A simple enough task were those retailers to employ well structured, semantically rich markup on their pages, but a tricky undertaking when faced with the "tag soup" of Bed, Bath & Beyond's site.
FeedMarshal (Python)
Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser is an excellent tool for converting a variety of XML feeds into useful python data structures for manipulation. Unfortunately there is no equivalent tool for converting those data structures back into XML (in this case Atom 0.3). This inelegant code is a quick fix to provide that functionality in one current project.
Mailman Interfaces (Perl)
In the past couple of years the python-based mailing list manager mailman has become the lis manager of choice. Its simple interface allows for easy administration of large lists and its increasing familiarity only helps it build on its success. When faced with the need to subscribe website users to lists without access to mailman's build in tools I wrote these perl modules to allow perl scripts to utilise the mailman web interface.
Invite.pm (Perl)
The website evite.com offers a number of useful features to help those planning an event manage their invitations. It is somewhat lacking in flexibility, however, and so I realised it would be useful to make available a script that could be installed on a wide range of web servers to provide similar functionality. This system is still under development, but an early version is now available. It is written in perl using the CGI::Application framework.
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