Albert O'Connor's Portfolio

Webpages

albert.infinitepigeons.org/wp/

albert.infinitepigeons.org/wp/ is my personal Blog. A few years ago, after trying a few different blogging engines, like most, I settled on WordPress. I modified a pre-made theme to suit my purposes. It served its best use as place to write about and keep track of the trip around the world I took in the summer of 2008.

www.phatalbert.ca

www.phatalbert.ca is my DJ website. It was originally powered by WordPress as an easy way to manage content. After learning the basics of Django I upgraded my request system and ported the whole site to use Django for increased flexiability. I broke up the podcast page, giving each episode its own page with comments, reusing Django's comment engine. I was also able to more deeply integrate my request system into the site as a whole quickly and easily using template inheritence. The request system took a few weeks, but the migration from WordPress to Django only took a few hours.

Demos

Chores
Development Time: ~ 2 days

Answers the question when did I last do that? A simple, interactive, webpage which helps people keep track of the things they should be doing regularly. Developed using Django, SQLite3 and served with mod_wsgi. I refined my use of jQuery to try to make the interaction feel more natural. I modeled the double click editable fields off of the iCal interface. All the changes tansperantly persist. Some of the source is available to view.

Use Live Demo

Notes:

• Assigning chores to "No One" doesn't work once you have assigned them to someone else.
• The "more..." and grey "albert" are both place holders for future functionality.

Glance
Development Time: ~ Week

Lets you know the new headlines since your last update at a quick glance. Developed using Django and SQLite3 served with mod_wsgi. I used feedparser to parse ATOM and RSS feeds. For this project I started exploring jQuery to add some usability touches like highlight articles from a feed when feed name is hovered over. I also figured out how to dig up a favicon for a given feed. The current manual update approach works surprisingly well. Someday I hope to make the update ajax so it can happen continually in the background. Glance has replaced my iGoogle page for keeping track of the news. Some of the source is available to view.

Use Live Demo

Notes:

• When deleting a feed you only see the result after you reload the page.
• Favicon depends on either the feed url or source url for the feed having a favicon.

Code Samples

Many of largest and most refined projects I have written code for are under NDA from my employers. Available here are some interview challenges, parts of university assignments and some personal project code. The code is in various states of refinement. The interview challenges were meant to display my ability to write maintainable code. The personal project code has not been specifically cleaned for presentation here to demonstrate even when I code for myself I keep it readable.

• Undo, written in 2004 in C++ for a undergraduate graphics project.
• Glance, written in 2009 in Python as a Productivity Tool.
• Chores, written in 2009 in Python as a Productivity Tool.
• "Combination" Lock, written in 2008 in C++ with a Python prototype for an interview.
• Compress Space Characters, written in 2008 in C/C++ for an interview.