Michael Donaldson - Website Development

A Badge of Friendship

Mike — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:24:52 +0000

A Badge of Friendship provide PR, management and live event services to record labels, bands, small companies and individuals helping them to raise their profile and find their voice.

I developed this website using the popular WordPress CMS (Content Management System). This website involved the creation of many different templates for each of the different types of pages that can be found around the website (examples of some of the templates created can be found in the screenshots below). Along with creating the many templates for this website, a MP3 player was required on each of the clients profile pages, this enabled the client to have some of their sample music to be displayed on their profile (i.e. if the client were a band).

The MP3 player was developed using Flash and ActionScript 3.0 and allows the user of the website to easily upload new sounds to their client profile (there can be more than 1 MP3 player present on each client profile page). The MP3 player also has the ability to customise the sound title that is displayed under the MP3 player and has the ability to add a download button below the MP3 player incase the client would like to offer a free sample.

Ferncroft Design Studio

Mike — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:52:46 +0000

Ferncroft Design Studio is an interior design company that works on renovations as well as with new construction with both residential and commercial clients.

I was hired to create this 19 page website and used modern W3C compliant XHTML for the structure of the website and W3C compliant CSS for the styling. Flash was used when creating this website for the video on the homepage which features a slide show of images that the design company wanted to display.

Live Website: http://ferncroftdesignstudio.com/

Art for Kunst

Mike — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:36:01 +0000

Art For Kunst is a new art project that offers high quality pieces of art from established street and graffiti artists.

On this website I was in charge of the development of the administration panel and CMS (content management system). This task was completed using the CodeIgniter PHP framework to ensure extra security and speed on the website.

Live website: http://artforkunst.com

Graphic Design: overthrow | uk

Working With: David Bond

Help Save MySQL!

Mike — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:10:42 +0000

If you haven’t already heard, Oracle are trying to buy Sun (the company that owns MySQL). If this is allowed to happen then Oracle will own and have control over MySQL which could be a terrible thing if not stopped.

Please support MySQL and help to stop Oracle from being allowed to purchase Sun by either sending a personalised email or one of the emails provided below to the EC (European Commission) at comp-merger-registry@ec.europa.eu

Pre-written Emails:

Please select the email that best demonstrates your view on the situation, if none do then you can simply write your own

A:
I don’t trust that Oracle will take good care of MySQL and MySQL should be divested to another company or foundation that have everything to gain by developing and promoting MySQL. One should also in the future be able to combine MySQL with closed source application (either by exceptions, a more permissive license or be able to dual license MySQL under favourable terms).

B:
I think that Oracle could be a good steward of MySQL, but I would need EC to have legally binding guarantees from Oracle that:
- All of MySQL will continue to be fully Open Source/free software in the future (no closed source modules).
- Open Source version and dual-licensed version of MySQL should have same source (like today).
- That development will be done in community friendly way.
- The manual should be released under a permissive license (so that one can fork it, the same way one can fork the server)
- That MySQL should be released under a more permissive license to ensure that forks can truly compete with Oracle if Oracle is not a good steward after all.
Alternatively:
- One should be able to always buy low priced commercial licenses for MySQL.
- All of the above should be perpetual and irrevocable.

There should also be mechanism so that if Oracle is not doing what is expected of it, forks should be able to compete with Oracle

C:
I trust Oracle and I suggest that EC will approve the deal unconditionally.

Thank you, please help MySQL remain out of the hands of Oracle!

Link/Source: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html

New Website Theme

Mike — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:29:40 +0000

Hello and welcome to the newly improved mike-donaldson.com!

I will use this website to share my works inside of website development. I will also use the website to post fixes to small (or large) issues in which I have faced when creating a website or incompatibility issues that I have come across. I will provide this information in the hope that it will help someone that is reading this blog

Check back soon for updates.

Mike