Spin Technologies - Website Design in Perth, Western Australia - Home

Presents for Everyone

2008-04-23T01:20:00Z

We’ve been busily working away on a couple of new sites that are almost ready to launch. One that has gone live in the past few days, and one that we’re particularly happy with, is Prezzi Express.

Another joint project with The Globe, Prezzi Express, like it’s name suggests, is a site that lets you purchase gifts and presents for friends and family. They have a select range of high quality products, easily categorised as Her, Him and Wedding amongst others.

Prezzi Express was set up with the aim of appealing to people with relatives and friends in Australia who want to be able to buy quality gifts for their loved ones, and have them gift wrapped and shipped with a minimum of fuss.

Oh, hi. Haven't seen you around in a while

2008-02-14T01:31:00Z

OK. So, we’re bad. Haven’t updated much in a while. Our bad.

In any case, there’s a new site for you to have a look at (actually, there’s a couple here and there, but we’ll get to that later). Working with The Globe again, we’ve recently completed a site for Marchmont Property Development

Marchmont build stuff all over Perth: commercial property, residential complexes and such. Rather large stuff.

Awards Craziness

2007-07-24T08:45:00Z

So, like, we’d like to thank my mum, my dad, my teachers … oh hang on, we haven’t won yet! Too soon!

The 2007 WA Web Awards finalists were named last week, and to our great surprise, two of our websites made the cut: MLC 100 and Soil Quality

Like everyone says, we’re just happy to have made the cut and it’s an honour etc etc, but we all know that we’re itching to win. However, we also know that the Perth International Arts Festival by the fine people at Clever Starfish are going to romp it in.

So, with that in mind, why not go over to the People’s Choice voting that’s being run by PerthNow and hand us a consolation vote! Go on, be nice.

Perth Sites in the Webby's

2007-04-11T05:59:00Z

The Perth International Arts Festival website, done by the clever starfish at, um, Clever Starfish has received a nomination for Best Events Website. They are up against some big names, including the BBC, Mercedes Benz and Lollapalooza, so this is great news. Congrats to Kay and team.

And in the Honorees section for News Sites there is PerthNorg, run by Bronwen Clune. Once again it’s a fantastic site that is really pushing up against some of the established players in the market, and (I’m assuming) a fraction of the budget.

So, as someone said on twitter, “Go Team Perth!”

What have you got in your soil?

2007-03-09T11:23:00Z

For the past 6 months or so, we’ve been busily working away at the new Soil Quality website. We’ve been working with Dan Murphy et al at UWA, and have partnered with a long list of organisations to bring you the site (go and have a look at the site and check out all the associated parties … there’s a lot!).

The main purpose of the website is to teach farmers and producers about the importance of long term monitoring of the health of their soils. It does this through a number of tools that allow them to view characteristics of the soils in their regions, compare their soils to those in their region and to examine the relationships between various indicators. Each of these tools uses data that has been collected over the past few years by growers groups and organisations around the state.

Gruff

On a technical note, we’re quite proud of some of the work that we’ve done, particularly some of the graphing work. We used a modified version of the sensational gruff graphing engine to draw the pretty graphs. We had to create a scatter plot module, as well as a variation on the box and whisker graph. There’s a little bit of cleanup work to do, but hopefully we’ll be sending those modules in so that they can be added to the base library. We also plan to write a more detailed post on just how we used gruff to draw those pretty graphs!

There’s also a fair amount of number crunching going on in the background as well, with over 800 data points and upwards of 15 soil test results for each data point, there’s a lot of numbers to be moved around. Once again, the site was built using RubyOnRails, which continues to amaze us daily. The ease at which complicated data sets and soil test results could be manipulated was eye opening, and the flexibility of Ruby (and the Rails framework) allowed us to basically do what ever we wanted with the data.

The site was designed by the fine folk at The Globe, who also developed a logo for Soil Quality. A shout out to Nik for his tidy work.

Won't someone think of the children?

2006-10-03T07:38:00Z

In what is going to be a regular occurrence over the next few weeks, we’re rather proud to announce the launch of another site – 2 Inspire.

2 Inspire is run by Karen and Rob Mason. The company offers a range of services to schools and youth organisations to inspire, motivate, encourage and just plain help kids with a wide range of issues. Rather than do their services an injustice, why not go and check out the site to find out what they do.

At the risk of sounding somewhat like a broken record, 2 Inspire is another RubyOnRails extravaganza. With a full CMS that allows Karen and Rob to edit and update all of the content on the site themselves. We’ve spent a lot of time making the administration area as simple to use as possible. So much so that it only took about 35 minutes to train Karen, and she’s been powering along ever since.

And the winner is ...

2006-10-02T00:17:00Z

We’ve been working with the fine collection of people at Consuming Passions for 6 years now on both the Tasting Australia and World Food Media Awards websites. And now we’ve just launched the fourth version of the site.

With a new sponsor this year, the 2007 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards recognises the best writers, television programmes, books, websites … anything to do with media and food really. People have been able to download the entry forms and nominee lists on previous versions of the site, but this year we’ve pulled out all the stops, with an online entry form.

Built (of course) using RubyOnRails, the website stores entries in a database. There is a secure administration area for the website that allows Consuming Passions to view the status or entries, do reports on the number of entries, and export that information into a variety of tools. And this is the main advantage of the online entry system over the old paper based system. Previously a number of tracking spreadsheets had to be created, with no real integration between them and anything else. Now, with the information in electronic form already, manual processing is reduced, and the data is more portable, which means that it can be used in any number of situations, something that was much more difficult previously.

The dam is about to burst

2006-09-26T08:45:00Z

In the last post, we alluded to the fact that we’ve been pretty busy, but didn’t really tell you much of what we’ve been doing. That wasn’t out of any deep need for secrecy or anything, just that we had other stuff to write about.

So what’s been going on? What’s been keeping the midnight oil suppliers in business? Well …

5 Senses

There’s a new site for 5 Senses on the way. Not much is going to change in the way of the design, but the entire backend is completely different. Re-written in RubyOnRails (natch), the site is much more flexible, with 5 Senses being able to edit more of the site than before. We’ve also tweaked the checkout process, to make it easier to use.

We’re in the process of switching Payment Gateways as well, this time going with eWay. We did some work on adding the gateway into the ActiveMerchant plugin, which makes credit card authorisation a snap.

Ampac

Ampac is one of our long-term clients. We started work with them back in 2000 or so, and over time the site has grown and grown. One of the problems with the old site is that it is just static HTML pages, which means management nightmare. The opportunity has never arisen to make any changes to it. Luckily, a few months ago, that situation changed, and we started work on a new site.

Totally new design, database backend, utilising the Globalize Rails plugin to handle multiple worldwide offices with the minimum of fuss for the client.

We’re just adding the final tweaks now, so look for this within a week or two.

World Food Media Awards

Another long-term client, we’ve done 3 versions of the World Food Media Awards website since 2001. This time, we’re adding the ability to do online entries, which will reduce the amount of time and effort needed to process the entries (a totally manual process prior to now).

Getting ready to launch on Friday!

Easyrider Tours

Backpackers and travellers have had the ability to make booking requests for almost a year now, but they’ve had no ability to pay for them online. The range of options when making a booking is almost insane, and has made adding live bookings quite difficult. However, we think we’ve finally cracked the nut, and this is only a week or two away.

Abi and Joseph

The Abi and Joseph range has been online for over one year, along with an email form to make a purchase, but we’re just adding the final touches at the moment to turn on live credit card purchasing.

Optika

A new client, this site is starting out as a relatively basic brochure site, but there’s big plans afoot for it to become the main control panel for contractors hired by Optika. We’ve got this site ready, but we’re just waiting for some final content from the fine people at Optika before we can go live.

2Inspire

2Inspire are another new client (recommended by those funny fellows at The Globe) who are just starting on their road to world domination … um, helping their fellow men and women and children. Or more particularly children. They are offering “Life Coaching” services to schools and youth organisations, to help them with whatever they need help with.

The Globe have done some delicious work on the design, and once again, we’re ever so close to going live.

You’d never believe it, but that’s just a small sampling of what we’ve been up to recently. Ever so busy, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Fun times ahead.

Waste Me

2006-09-22T07:56:00Z

OK, so we know. It’s been a while. Not good. But, we’ve been hard at work, beavering away creating some groovy little sites. A lot of which are very close to launch.

So, one we have finished is up and running: Western Metropolitan Regional Council. It’s a bit hard to explain exactly what they do, but essentially they’re responsible for all the Waste Management in a number of suburbs in the west of Perth. Now, that conjurs up images of garbage men travelling around the city, and an odour that’s none too pleasant. That’s part of the deal, but there’s so much more cool stuff happening beyond that.

One example is that WMRC, in association with EarthCarers, run education programs that help people begin recycling programmes, minimise their waste and become all around good earth type people.

Perhaps the coolest thing of the lot is the ORT Alliance. This is basically a bloody huge pressure cooker, that just takes a lot of rubbish (scraps, paper, food etc) and cooks it until it’s a less than appetising “slurry”, which they then sell to market gardeners. Who then, of course, produce the food that is going to make tomorrows food scraps.

Anyway, we did the site. We like it (of course). Like all of our websites, it’s another RubyOnRails extravaganza, with an admin area that basically lets WMRC change anything on the site that they want to.

Open Source It: Campaign Monitor

2006-05-13T09:25:00Z

A few months ago, we wrote about the love we have for Campaign Monitor. We love using it, and we’ve integrated it into several projects that we’ve worked on recently (including one we’ll tell you about next week).

One of the main reasons that we act like giddy schoolgirls around Campaign Monitor is the fact that they have a wonderful API. (An API is an interface that lets developers access features of a website from within their own code … it’s cool. Trust us!) Being the nice fellows that they are, they also included sample code that lets you easily access their API, if you are developing in ASP.Net or PHP. Of course, that left us RubyOnRails junkies out on the street, cold turkey style.

Not any more! It makes us immeasurably proud to announce the release of our first open source project: CampaignMonitor

Using the particularly wonderful Flickr Ruby interface written by Scott Raymond as a guide, we built a simple wrapper class that lets you access most of the functionality of the CampaignMonitor API. (We say most, because there’s a couple of things we haven’t got working yet, but hey, it’s only a version 0.1.0 release, so cut us some slack!).

And how would you use it? Well here’s a simple example:

    require 'campaign_monitor'

    @cm = CampaignMonitor.new()

    @clients = @cm.clients

    for client in @clients
        puts client.name
    end

Easy! Now you do it. Check out the documentation to get you started.

For more information, check out the source at our Trac install: http://trac.spintech.com.au/plugins. SVN access coming soon.

Remember, it’s only 0.1.0, and we’ve still got a fair way to go. But jump in, and let us know of any bugs you run across.

Get Your Exercise On

2006-03-09T01:49:00Z

A short while ago we launched Abi & Joseph to little fanfare. Abi White was launching her new Pilates and Exercise Casualwear Clothing company and was understandably focussed on finalising the product range, the marketing material and actually getting her product into stores. We worked on a basic website to highlight the range of products and to provide contact information.

Now, with a successful product launch behind them, we are proud to announce the addition of several features to the site, the most important being the online ordering facility. You can now browse the catalog of clothing, and choose from a frankly astonishingly large range of fabrics, sizes and colours.

Control your computers

2006-03-08T05:56:00Z

Computerworld and SchoolSeek

2006-03-07T05:58:00Z

The other day I did an interview with Rodney Gedda about RubyOnRails. The resulting article was just published in the online edition. All very exciting we think.

The article mentions the SchoolSeek site, that we are currently rewriting in RubyOnRails, and I just thought I would expand on some of the points that are touched on in the article.

The other day I did an interview with Rodney Gedda about RubyOnRails. The resulting article was just published in the online edition. All very exciting we think.

The article mentions the SchoolSeek site, that we are currently rewriting in RubyOnRails, and I just thought I would expand on some of the points that are touched on in the article.

When we built the site (originally called WhichSchool?) we used C# and the ASP.Net framework. We created a database structure that allowed for a wide range of information about the schools to be stored, with flexibility the overriding principle. Basically that means that the database could adapt to store different types of information about different schools. We used a technique called Container Managed Persistence that is more often seen in the Java world, mainly because it provided a layer of abstraction between our business objects (the bits of code that do all the interesting stuff) and the database (the place where all the information is stored. Without getting too deep into the whole procedure the approach requires some config files that provide a link between the database structure and the business objects.

This is all very good and well when we were building the application, but when it comes time to do some maintenance work, or to start adding new features, it can quickly become a little scary. So, when the fine folks at SchoolSeek asked for some additions to the site, we initially reacted with a little fear at the amount of tedium we would be in for. We sat down and scoped out the work and realised the changes would take about 25 hours. It was at this point our natural desire to work on cool stuff in preference to boring stuff kicked in and we thought “Hey, you could redo the entire site in RubyOnRails in about 30 hours couldn’t you?”. To which the only answer was a resounding yes. Benefits from this decision: it meant we actually wanted to do the work and would mean that future updates would be barrel loads of fun as well. All good.

So we sat down and did it. We’re almost done (hopefully getting ready to launch the revised/rewritten/improved site later on this week) and so far we’re sitting at about 18 hours. And that includes building it so we take advantage of some of the damn cool features of RonR – Migrations being the best. We’ve got a few features to finish, but they are mostly pre-existing areas that just need to be replicated.

And the new features that would have taken so long in C#? Well, we did that one morning waiting at the car dealers for our car to be serviced.

Nice.

Edit: Fixed a broken link to Migrations

We meant to call. Seriously.

2006-03-06T06:02:00Z

It’s been a while since we met last. We meant to write. Honest we did. But you know how these things go. Work gets in the way, and then it’s all just too difficult.

What are we trying to say? Well, we meant to write about some of the wonderful things we’ve been working on, but most of the time it was those very things themselves that kept us from writing. (In english that means we’ve been really busy!)

So, what’s been taking all our time? Well, we’re going to spread that out over another couple of posts … just for the suspense of it all really, no other reason. But the observant among you will notice some new projects on the right hand side of the page. If you’re waiting for our wonderful, witty and informative articles on the work that we’ve done, then you could do a lot worse than checking out KVM Australia and Abi and Joseph.

Biblio Launch

2006-01-11T06:03:00Z

The other day we were reading Seth Godin’s blog and there was an entry called Stuck Systems about how an online bibliography creator that allowed people to easily create and share bibliographies didn’t exist. So, we built one – Biblio.

It’s still very limited in it’s functionality (sharing bibliographies isn’t available yet), but it’s here, and it’s going to improve. We use Amazon Web Services to do the searching, and the wonderful Ruby/Amazon library, that makes it all dead simple to do.

Oh, and of course it’s built on RubyOnRails.

Let us know what you think.