Welcome to my "after hours" portfolio!
I have worked on both internal and external web development. Internal work has not only fascinated me, but been a place where I have been able to make marked and measurable improvements.
Good external customer service is widely thought to come from good internal customer service, and good usability for the Intranet is a powerful way to deliver good internal customer service.
Many of my most interesting work has been for private audiences, which is a complication in jobhunting: a reference may speak highly of the work I did, but probably cannot show you my work even if they wanted to. However, this need not be a roadblock that cannot be moved.
Clients who prefer confidentiality for the details of my work for them include:
There are several works showcased here. I invite you to hover your mouse over any of the buttons to the left, or click any site's "Next" button to see the next part of the showcase.
Jonathan Hayward
Welcome to Blue and Gray!
Civil War re-enacting is increasingly popular, in the U.S. North as well as the South, and my brother is a re-enactor who studied the Civil War in his history major. This was given most immediately to him, but also his regiment, and "the hobby."
Technology-wise, this is based on Python + Django + Pinax, a stack that means you can get a good standard Web 2.0 website in production with little more than CSS rebranding to a white-label base and have something there. The innards are all available to tinker with, but the design is well enough executed that you don't need to tinker with internals most of the time.
Jonathan Hayward
Impressions of Cambridge
Visit Impressions of Cambridge!
Cambridge, England is a beautiful place. I wanted to take a souvenir with me, but wanted something bigger than shops would have. So I created a Myst-like virtual tour, both software and over six hundred photographs, stitched together in a virtual world you can navigate.
I built the script mainly using Python, and producing HTML and using CGI under Apache.
Jonathan Hayward
Welcome to Jonathan's Corner!
Jonathan's Corner has been at its present location since 2001, and its purpose, in a word, is to showcase its author's creations. It has over 2000 pages and has won over 200 awards, not to mention Google PR5.
There are many challenges surrounding such an endeavor; the information architecture (IA) is one of placing order around a large and heterogenous collection of creative works. Not only is this more than a literature site, housing games, open source software, and various other creations, but the literatue itself is varied and leaves a would-be information architect with a classic counting problem even in deciding how many categories there are.
But this site works, both in terms of IA and usability; the usability le less a brilliantly devious solution than using standard tools and techniques well. There may be plenty of creativity in the articles; there is a quite deliberate lack of creativity in the usability and user interface.
Where JonathansCorner.com is optimized for online reading, its book store offers beautiful hardcover books for sale as well as e-books. It's a single-page tweak that takes advantage of the main site, but focuses attention in a way that works for an author site.
This is a single, static page with deep links offering points to jump in to the main site. The technologies are HTML, CSS, and Apache.
Jonathan Hayward (a.k.a. C.J.S. Hayward)
Jonathan's Corner: Mobile Edition
Visit Jonathan's Corner, Mobile Edition!
The Mobile Web Proxy won the "Editor's Pick" award from Brothersoft, and here it is applied to make an on-the-fly mobile adaptation of Jonathan's Corner.
Jonathan Hayward
The Magic Notebook
I've used several content management systems, and I've built several content management systems. The Magic Notebook was the first where the SAAS gained traction and saw serious use. It allows for heirarchical display and drill-down of information, as well as pulling down random quotes. Is it a toy or a real tool? You can say either, but it helped me move from making toy content management systems to making real content management systems.
Jonathan Hayward
Orthodox Church Fathers
Visit Orthodox Church Fathers!
Orthodox Church Fathers is probably the largest content management system I have built, and it works as search engine allowing access to hundreds of megabytes of classics.
The first spark of the project began as an artificial inteligence project to support searching. By the time the artificial intelligence fizzled, it became clear that a very interesting user interface had developed:
Visit Orthodox Church Fathers!
The left half of the screen is the "search results" screen; it comes with a concordance to let you specify exactly which occurrence of a search term you want to drill down on. The right half of the page displays search results, and responds almost immediately to what you click too the left. This makes for fundamentally faster searching.
Jonathan Hayward
Orthodox Network
Orthodox Network, after the main Orthodox network had been down for months, was largely a matter of "Point. Click. Shoot." It runs on the same framework as Blue and Gray.
Jonathan Hayward
The Powered Access Bible
Visit the Powered Access Bible!
This project began originally to read text aloud in English while I was reading it in Greek. Since then it has changed considerably and allowed essentially the same kind of interactions Orthodox Church Fathers allows: you make a search and then zero in on the exact location much faster than if you use the Bible Gateway.
And it is more accessible than the Bible Gateway. (I've been told explicitly.) One friend and visitor, totally blind from birth ("ask me any question you want,") said that the reading panel at JonathanHayward.com/pb was "the most JAWS-friendly Bible I've seen yet." (JAWS is the main web browser used by visually impaired visitors. If blind visitors aren't enough of a motivation to do something that will work well with JAWS, consider that the way JAWS sees your website is how Google's spider sees your website.) The Powered Access Bible was designed to allow powered access to the average user, but it was a good enough job to be excellent for blind visitors seeking an accessible Bible as well.
Proportional Font Terminal
The Unix/Linux terminal is stuck in a time warp as far as typography goes. One of the most basic lessons that is learned in typography is that there are very, very few situations where a fixed-width font (like this, where a 'W' and an 'I' have identical proportions) is a better than a proportional terminal, like most of the page. For people who are writing, revising, and trying to understand a computer code, proportional fonts are far superior to fixed-width fonts. Perhaps there is some nostalgia for ancient roguelike games which would be undecipherable in a fixed-width font:
However, we developers carry cultural baggage that code may learn other lessons from typography, but we need fixed-width display to learn code:
Visit Proportional Font Terminal!
But we do not apply one of the most basic typographical lessons that hit the web years ago: use proportional fonts when we can. If we do, our code looks like this:
The original Ajaxterm was well-engineered--enough so that it just took a few CSS tweaks and one Python adjustment to serve up, via the web, a proportional font terminal. (The lion's share of the work is done by the original terminal; all new tweaks are minor.)
To my knowledge this is the first proportional font terminal for Unix/Linux to use this basic lesson from web typography.
Saint Innocent of Moscow
Saint Innocent of Moscow is a Russian Orthodox parish, and I was able to do a complete redesign of the website. I kept the content, but overhauled the the graphic design and quietly instilled a more graceful IA.
Jonathan Hayward
Simply Classic Remodeling
Visit Simply Classic Remodeling!
Simply Classic Remodeling is a pro bono brochure site that features hijaxing, HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, SEO, server-parsed HTML, and unobtrusive Ajax to represent a construction remodeling contractor's business on the web.
Jonathan Hayward
Stornge.mobi
Visit The Stornge Mobile Web Proxy!
Stornge.mobi, like The Magic Notebook, is a SAAS demo for one of my open source software projects, and one that took traction; I've seen an article in Chinese that prominently figured the term, Stornge.mobi. It's taken enough traction that it is not only used on the low-end low-feature phones that I originally designed it for, but because it serves up pages at lightning speeds to an iPhone or an Android in a place with terrible bandwidth.
Jonathan Hayward
Systematic Political Science
Visit Systematic Political Science!
Systematic Political Science is my most longstanding client website. The author seeks a unity of social sciences that is theologically grounded and has a strong sense of right and wrong. He has been a client of mine for 5+ years, and it is my candid opinion that every consultant should have a client like this.
Jonathan Hayward