Giant Robot

Konrad, my brother's mate, has just got konradk.co.nz up and running. Took us a couple of hours Piha time: me fooling with a Kubrick derivative I dubbed Konrick, Konrad writing his bio up in WordPress and James roasting the veges. Delicious! And I quite like the header graphic, which was a result of me pointing at a colour palette and saying "which colour do you like?" and Konrad answering "all of them". So that's what we did.

The elections have come and gone - amazing how quickly, it seems only a week or two ago that I put together a countdown ticker for Frog Blog but I know when it began it said forty-nine days (seven weeks ago then I guess). Now polling is over and it's time to go back to our ordinary lives.

Came up to Northland today and had a chat to John Agace of Enterprise Russell. He was still ticking along using a content editor I dreamed up several years ago, and I don't mind admitting that it was well behind the times!

So, after our chat I knocked together a really quick site look for ERNZ running WordPress. I know WordPress isn't the only CMS available, but it's the first one I've found which is easy enough for $your_grandma to use.

Some updates to the Monarch.org.nz website - improving their data collection methodology on butterfly sightings.

The site has been surprisingly successful, and already a large sample has been collected on wintering Monarch butterflies in Aotearoa. The project is bringing a lot of butterfly folks together as well, which is excellent!

For the Frog. Because it's hard to type when you have green thumbs!

This is a stats plugin to do some tricks for the election here in Aotearoa this year, on the Green Party campaign blog. I neeed to source license OK from GPNZ before I can release the code (still working on it, license questions can wait until it's working, ahaha).

This module for WebHaven allows the calculation of loan repayments for an insurance brokering firm, ACM. It combines an advanced JavaScript UI (which updates the loan calculations and payment fields) with a Roxen module that does sophisticated iterative financial (IRR, NPV) calculations on the back end. Once it's calculated the terms of the loan, it generates a PDF for client signoff and stores the term details (including calculated payment dates) in an SQL db.

The Dog and Lemon Guide is one of New Zealand's most comprehensive car buyer's guides, and the Dog and Lemon website contains an additional store of information on Japanese vehicle manufacturer recalls.

Oh, I made the dog less black and more sepia greenish. We'll see about that in the morning ...

Working with a site that has many RXML <insert /> tags to build blocks of nested code. It all works nicely, but I noticed this evening how much the RXML "run errors" thrown by missing include/insert files can slow down the parse. Presumably because it has to write to the debug log ...

The Dickies Workwear Catalogue was designed by Andy (previously of Lava Magazine), and Resolver contracted Giant Robot to make the design work and integrate online payment for the catalogue to process sales in NZ. It's pretty neat ... funnily enough, as I type this I'm wearing pants bought while testing out the sales mechanism. That's cool! Thanks Aaron.