Web Sites I Made

Note that I also worked on a variety of other web sites than those which are listed here, for various entities over the last few years. Most significant of those was a web based application for Anthony Macauley Associates, which was part of their product lineup, and there was a whole team working on it. See the Resume page for more references to my work that include web applications.

HotelsMotels.com

This site was the largest and most significant one that I have worked on to date. I worked on it mainly in 2006-2008. Developed for and paid for by the Traveller's Inn, HotelsMotels.com was a worldwide directory of businesses that would be of interest to travellers, grouped by city, focusing on such businesses as hotels, dining, attractions, activities, and services. This website incorporated about 1120 domain names, each for a city or state or country (or continent), for example VictoriaHotelsMotels.com, and all of them aliased to the same Apache web server and served up by a single web application that is savvy to what domain name it was invoked under; there are at least 30,000 distinct locations as of 2008, and any without its own domain just displays under the HotelsMotels.com domain. HotelsMotels was dynamically generated and database backed. The backend application was written in Perl and used a MySQL database as a backend. Visitors could browse or search for businesses, leave reviews on businesses, and submit new businesses for listing. The whole operation was Unicode savvy, and used UTF-8 end-to-end. All site administration and updates were done through the same Perl program, over encrypted connections, where either staff could login and update what locations or industries or businesses exist, or process visitor link submissions or comments. Visitors had to create an account, validated using their email address, through which they either submitted businesses to the directory or submitted reviews, and nothing done by visitors had any affect on the site until approved by a staff member. Through various measures such as these, HotelsMotels was built with relatively good security practices in mind and with considerable resiliance against being used to display spam. At the same time, the site was built to be fairly easy to use and navigate, and be friendly with search engines; for example, every display page can be navigated to just by following hyperlinks, and every page has a canonical url, and CSS is used to control appearances, and urls are descriptive. HotelsMotels also provides the means for visitors to check availability of hotel rooms in the database and to book those rooms, using connections to an affiliate site. HotelsMotels already existed as a multi-domain site prior to my involvement, and its current appearance strongly resembles the prior version; during 2006-2008, I was brought in and tasked to reimplement the site to be dynamic and database backed, whereas prior to my involvement the site was generated as a mixture of static files generated from MS Access databases with some dynamic PHP components, and wasn't searchable and lacked many other features. My version was originally written in PHP as per the client's request, but was then translated to Perl after the first few months as a significant improvement, gaining Unicode-savvy among other benefits. Please keep in mind that the graphics and visual layout were not done by me, but rather my work was in the technical implementation or backend.

BidOnStay.com

This site is another significant one developed for and paid for by the Traveller's Inn, which provided an alternate way for travellers to book hotel rooms at the Traveller's Inn. I worked on it mainly in early 2008. For available rooms, a visitor could "bid" on the price they pay to stay there, and their first bid above a hidden minimum is what they would pay. They are given 3 tries per hotel per day. The site had no local database backend, and was essentially stateless, but that it used session variables and cookies, and otherwise was a front to an affiliate site that handled the actual booking. BidOnStay was significant technically in that it invoked the affiliate web site behind the scenes as if it were a web service, for all stages except for the final main registration, which visitors were 301-redirected to. So this work effectively counts as experience in making or using web services. This project was a brand new one rather than a reimplementation. Please keep in mind that the graphics and visual layout were not done by me, but rather my work was in the technical implementation or backend.

Chronology.Net

This site covers one of my personal interests, and it gets about 500 page views per day. The site is currently being rebuilt in a database-driven fashion as the culmination of an effort I began in August of 1997. When this is complete I expect to have a fan-edited resource that lists fiction from a wide range of media, cross-referenced with information on creators of said works, character appearances, crossovers, timelines, publication dates, and so on. In addition, works created by fans of the above fictions will be indexed and cross-referenced where appropriate, including fan fictions, fan art, and fan websites. Initially the focus of this site will be on science fiction and it will be editable by approved site visitors using a web interface. This current version of this site is entirely generated using the same program that powers my personal website.

Website of Darren Duncan

My personal "home page", this site's main purpose is to tell visitors about me. It is mainly oriented on my personal skills and interests, and is meant to showcase some of my web programming skills. As such, the site is entirely generated by a program that I wrote, rather than being a collection of static html pages. I do not go in to detail on my interests here, as they are better relegated to other sites.

BCBC Intranet

The result of most of my first two Camosun Co-Op work terms, in the fall of 1999, this is the Intranet for British Columbia Buildings Corporation. This site involves a lot of Active Server Pages and templates, as well as some Perl scripts and database connectivity. It was a group project developed over 1999, and I came on during the implementation stage. Unfortunately, since this is behind a firewall, you can only see it if you are a BCBC employee.

Voices

The first 6 or so weeks of my first Camosun Co-Op work term, in the summer of 1999, was to take the sole 4 editions of a printed periodical and convert them into a static web format, both text and pictures, and preserve as much of the original magazine's visual style as possible. Three issues I had the original Pagemaker files from that I could extract the contents; the other issue I had to retype all the text (but didn't scan the pictures). The periodical, named Voices, was published by the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society (VIRCS), who hired me to do the conversion. Voices is an educational quarterly about anti racism and multicultural initiatives and issues in and around the community. The volunteer Editorial Board of community activists hope to provoke discussion and inspire projects that identify and extinguish racism in any form. The Voices web edition was originally published on the VIRCS web site in 1999; later it was severely modified (for the worse) by someone else, and then later removed from the web site. In the interest of historical accuracy, I have posted a backup copy of the web edition as I originally made it in 1999; that is what the heading url points to.

Perfection Of Hope

This site was done as a group project for my Human Computer Interface (comp 140) course at Camosun College during November of 1997. It is a home page for local author Elizabeth Simpson to promote her book "Perfection of Hope". The heading url points to a backup copy of this web site that I host for historical purposes, as my group originally made it; the site no longer exists at its original address (http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~simpson/).

IOS River Temperature Model

My very first web site, this is a home page for a project being done at the Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS) to assist with predicting the size of salmon runs. "The model itself is a numerical temperature simulation program capable of predicting the riverwater temperature as a function of space and time given a variety of input variables." I made this for the Ocean Physics Department as part of my un-paid Work Experience there during the summer of 1996. The original site has changed significantly since I worked on it, with the current version visible here. For historical accuracy, the heading url goes to an archived copy of what I worked on.

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Web Sites I Made
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