Welcome to the online portfolio of Jamie Love.
Specializing in CSS, SEO, web standards and clean, effective writing.

It's been a whirlwind of a summer, and I have two new websites that are almost ready to go live, Royce Shoes and Sly Magazine. Because they're both still being tested, I don't have any links to share, but I can still bore you with the details. Royce is a retail shoe store here in Vancouver. They needed a way to keep their inventory online and up to date, so I built them a CMS with PHP and MySQL, and added some smooth jQuery behaviors to spice things up. The site is based on web standards and is cross-browsers compatible.

The second webiste, Sly Magazine, is based on Wordpress with some custom functionality built in. The biggest challenge was going from 0 to hero in less than two weeks ( which was the client's timeframe). However, working with the very talented guys at Vibrant Software, I met the deadline with minutes to spare. I'll have the link up in a few days.

It may have been nearly six months in the making, but the new web presence of Canvas Hair and Nail Salon is live. One of the excellent designers at Taft Media design the interface, and I built standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Under the hood, the site runs on PHP and MySQL with a custom-built CMS for the staff of the salon to upload new product, stylists, and news items. There are also some nice little jQuery behaviors for good measure.

Recently on Duck & Cover, I wrote a review of the new Metric album. Embedded in that review is a Flash object that streams the entire album. The folks on Metric's label were kind enough to provide this nifty gizmo, but I had an issue with how it worked. As soon as you reached Duck & Cover, the album would begin. I'm sure they thought this was a great way to maximise the number of listeners, but it's also extremely annoying. It's also provides a bad user experience, so I decided to disable the sound unless the user clicked "play." At first, I thought all I had to do was add a parameter to disable autoplay like this: <param name="play" value="false"/>. Yet when I added this to the object emded code, it still played when the page loaded. With a little tinkering and research, I learned I needed "autoplay=false" in the flashvars parameter, too, making it look like this: <param name="flashvars" value="widget_id=https://app.topspin.net/ [...] width=400&height=300&autoplay=false" />