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.
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