Conissaunce has provided expertise to a wide range of organisations and individuals. Below is a selection of recent projects. Click on any name for more information.

twofish Music

twofish is the band Charles plays in when not working with Conissaunce and so he had quite a vested interest in this project!

Conissaunce provided the complete solution for twofish-music.com designing the web site initially in HTML, architecting the solution, developing, testing and deploying the site. The main portion of the site provides background information on the band and allows registered customers to download MP3s of their music. Band members also have access to download and page access stats, and basic content management facilities. The site was developed using JEE (Servlets/JSP/JDBC) and runs on top of MySQL in a Linux environment.

Site Requirements

The main purpose of the site was to provide a means for fans of the band to get access to band material and for us to collect email addresses and feedback from our audience. Although quite a lot of the site content is expected to stay fixed for relatively long periods of time, we wanted the ability to post news items and receive track reviews on the site. Since not all the feedback is received via the one site (we also receive emails from people and maintain a page on Peoplesound) we wanted to be able to build up a list of favourite quotes which would be randomly displayed on the site home page. We also wanted the site to keep track of download stats and page “hits” and provide a set of reports allowing us to look at trends and other basic statistical information without resorting to going through the server logs.

Site Design

The site lay-out was initially done using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver using the template capability. Templates let you build a set of multiple pages that share a similar structure and graphical identity quickly, and enable you to lock down certain portions of the page to avoid accidental changes and inconsistencies.

The template I needed for the site was pretty basic comprising a single editable region in the middle of the page, with navigation and news items locked to the template.

Developing the Java Servlets

From here it was possible to quickly pull together most of the more static content we wanted – intro page, band biog, equipment, influences and the like, and also to sketch out the dynamic content pages (reviews/downloads).

I've always liked the Java servlet API and, since I would be responsible for maintaining the site, I decided to use them more-or-less exclusively on this project. This presented me with the problem of moving from the static html to servlets so, to save myself some time, I put together a little app in VB which takes an HTML file as input and outputs the correctly escaped lines with printLn().

View the web site.