Asha Kirkby approached me and asked me to create her a new website with the ability to integrate with PayPal, giving her the ability to streamline the online section of her business.
SkateFresh provides inline skating lessons to all people, mainly based in the London area, and currently employs 6 instructors. SkateFresh is also involved with the International Inline Skating Association, certifying other instructors in the UK.
After initial consultation with Asha regarding overall development on the site, I took apart her current website and determined that she needed her own Content Management Solution, so that she can update the content when she wishes, instead of relying on other people, which will increase the client happiness. I also determined that she needed an online booking system with integrated calendar, so that any clients can see when the next class was available on the website, and if so wanted, book a place on it.
After the initial Phase 1 of the site was deployed, we had further discussions regarding the PayPal integration and the checkout path, and agreed on a simplistic solution where a client can either book a lesson, or purchase vouchers to be used in all lessons. We also agreed against allowing the client to purchase lessons against an individual instructor, as all the money would directly go to Asha initially, and individual instructors may not be impressed by this.
By April, the site with paypal integration had gone live.
A few months later, SkateFresh had designed some TShirts and had planned to sell them on the website, which warranted another change and addition to the PayPal checkout process, this was done very efficiently and worked without any problems.
Monty has provided an excellent design, hosting and ongoing maintenance for my business. I am very impressed by the speed and turn around of my requests into new, live content, and I have never had such a consistently high Google ranking. I would recommend his services to anyone.
Asha Kirkby, Owner, SkateFresh
I created PickledHedgehog in early June as a portfolio site for all my personal projects outside of what I do at work, from code generators to asp.net HTTP pipeline modules, for things that I am planning to release, either as closed source, or as opensource projects. I am one of those people that uses "spare brain cycles" to create things (most of the time), and since I am passionate about programming, it made sense.
A personal favourite of mine are my config generators - both the AppSettings generator, and the Configuration Section Generator, which save alot of time, and work quite well (I have found a few issues with them, but I have always fixed them. Someone who works for Microsoft has also found certain issues with the code generator, but this was also fixed as soon as I had the chance.
Since I have created the generators, I started expanding the generators into a framework, that wraps around .net's CodeDom namespace - it makes creation of code a lot easier than using the CodeDom, which can have its quirks sometimes - and I am planning to introduce more web-based code generators soon, including stuff like a Collection<T> class generator, and possibly .net class library project creation for both the current generators I have at the moment.
Babblers came to be around January 2003, when another gaming community that I have been "following" (I didn't really participate), had ... issues and decided to ban about a hundred of its members. I was badgered, repeatedly, by people who had the illusion that I knew something about computers and websites, to setup a rival site for the members to join, so I thought what the heck, and went ahead and created a forum, based around Invision Power Board (based on php)
To be really honest, I didn't think the site would take off - I expected there to be a few posts, and then the whole thing to die a week or two later - but I was very surprised. Within a day there was 100 members, within a week there was over 350 members - the site was spreading like wildfire, and before I knew it, I had my own gaming community.
Since then the site has gone from strength to strength, and now has over 3,000 registered members, and over 425,000 posts across 13 different topics, ranging from "General Chat" to a Help and advice forum.