I’ve been working at s1 for eight years now, designing and developing some of Scotland’s leading online destinations like s1jobs, s1homes and s1′s local community platform.  As one of the original three members of the tech team, I’ve been involved in virtually everything that s1 has launched over the years.

Since December 2007 I’ve been working as Web Producer, managing a four-strong development team with responsibility for s1jobs, s1learning and a number of smaller sites.  Our biggest product launch of the year was the redesigned s1jobs (“now with fancy bits”) which launched successfully on schedule earlier this month.   At that time I decided to seek out a fresh challenge and was offered a move into the newspaper side of the business.

So… my new role is as Digital Innovation Manager for the Herald & Times group.  This role will see me return to the bits of my job I really love — playing with technology and coming up with innovative solutions to complex problems.   Or as the job spec puts it, I will “lead thinking on innovation, identify relevant emerging technologies and business ideas and spearhead audience drivers like search engine optimisation”.  

I’m really looking forward to starting this new role at the end of October, but in the meantime I’ve got one last project to complete for s1.  I can’t say much about it just now, but look out for a new launch in early 2009.

Today sees the launch of the new s1jobs.com, now full of ‘fancy bits’ like homepage personalisation, AJAX search results, drag & drop personalisation of My Account, etc, etc.   It’s also a completely fresh, new design which gives us more space for content while allowing new ad formats such as the leaderboard and useful new stuff like our tailored tip (CRM) messages.  Naturally, there are some SEO improvements in there too.

We actually flicked the switch around 7pm last night, just to give us enough time to test and tweak it on the live servers before the usual morning traffic spike.  So far the site is actually performing even better than expected, the AJAX search results are so quick you’d swear they were cached.   Here’s a quick shot of the new homepage:

The site is the culmination of nine months work from the planning stages and four months full-time design and development.  I’m really pleased with the result and I think it pushes us even further ahead of the competition in Scotland, indeed even in the rest of the UK.  Congratulations to everyone involved – you know who you are.

The re-design will be backed by a TV, press and online advertising campaign starting today.

Earlier this week we launched the latest extension to s1jobs.com – a portal targetting current and prospective Public Sector workers.   You can see it now at public.s1jobs.com.

Although the site is mostly static content, it still contains a number of innovations for s1.  Firstly, there’s a complete content CMS powered by Adobe Contribute that allows our SEO experts to tweak and add content whenever they like, without tech team intervention.  Secondly, there’s a new Flash-based carousel for employer logos that allows more logos to be displayed in a smaller space, and in a more interesting way.  Finally, there’s a host of server-side tweaks to make all of this possible — not least in the classification of all our exisiting Public Sector employers into their particular sector.

Hopefully the end result will prove popular with Public Sector workers, and with the search engines.

Today the Evening Times launched 12 new local community sites for areas of Glasgow.   The sites are based on the “s1local” platform I developed last year.  The first sites based on the s1local launched in December under the s1 brand, so we had to build in some customisations to allow the Evening Times to launch sites under their own brand.

I’m sure you can expect to see more community sites launched across Scotland in the coming months, both Evening Times branded ones in Glasgow and s1 branded sites elsewhere.

Next Monday (10th March) I’ll be handing over ownership of the local sites to our newest Web Producer, Graeme Smith.  I’m sure his team will extend the s1local platform and provide a lot of exciting new features over the coming months. 

Please take a look at the new Evening Times sites, and if you live in one of these commuities, join in:  Shawlands; Hillhead; Maryhill; Gorbals; Cardonald; Easterhouse; Partick; Robroyston; Whiteinch; Springburn; Dennistoun; Tollcross.

For the past few months I’ve been working on IT exhibits for Glasgow Science Centre.  What started out as a commission for two interactive exhibits turned into a project involving five exhibits.  These ranged from relatively simple touch-screen video interactives to full-blown games and dual-screen applications. A few highlights…

News Editor

This exhibit allows visitors to edit their own news story, selecting video clips, applying blue-screen effects, applying captions and music to produce a news piece suitable for broadcast.  Once complete, visitors can re-play their entire package as it would be shown on TV, complete with titles and credits.

The tricky part here was getting Flash to seamlessly stream one clip after the other with no buffering delay.  Other people had abandoned Flash in the past for its limitations in handling frame-accurate video playback.  For this project I had to develop some Actionscript routines that guaranteed seamless playback and syncronisation of title overlays.

You Vote

This one features a touch-screen interface, webcam and large projection screen.  Visitors are allowed to vote on the topic of the day, then have their head ‘beamed’ onto a cartoon body of their choice on the projection screen. 

I knew before I started that the difficulty would be in syncronising content between the two screens – one a 19″ touch-screen, the other a 6ft projector display. A solution was developed using specific graphics cards, a load of Actionscript and advanced configuration of the touch-screen software.

Organ Transplant

Organ Transplant was the last exhibit we developed and is probably the most popular of them all.  It’s so popular that Glasgow Science Centre had to install a second terminal beside the first to meet demand.  The high score table, controlled by an on-screen keyboard, has made things highly competitive — the current high score is 540, more than double my highest score!

There’s a few higher res photos of my exhibits here.

If you go to Glasgow Science Centre, please take a look and let me know what you think.

I’ve just finished another online game for Glasgow Science Centre.  The Bang or No Bang live show explores the science of risk though a series of demonstrations based on popular game shows.

GSC commissioned me to develop an online Flash game to allow web visitors to experience one of the demonstrations from the show.  The game displays probabilities through a ‘luck-o-meter’ gauge – a tongue-in-cheek reference, as the show clearly demonstrates “there’s no such thing as luck”.

You can play it online here: Bang or No Bang game.