A spiffy site for Dublin City Council and the cycling unit at Dublin City Cycling. Articles, blog, events calendar, routes, maps, and an interactive Google map where you can place a pin to suggest a location for a new cycle stand in Dublin. There is voting for specific locations and some nice social media tools to help you pimp your favourite points.

To make the interactive cycle stand map possible, Drupal seemed like the best bet at the time so I worked with my other half, John Handelaar. We are in complete agreement that we are never, ever using Drupal for anything ever again. It was literally hell in a bug-ridden box.

Nevertheless, we completed this site in time to submit it to the Irish Web Awards for Best Government and Council website, but it didn’t make the short list, which is kind of a bummer. But it was fun anyway – the client is happy happy and Anthony McGuinness was a pleasure to work with. Dublin City Council should give him a raise for being a super-hero.

The Good Wine Show site went live a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have the ten minutes to tidy the tiny stuff nobody else will ever notice until last night.

When you have a budget of tuppence and literally need a site the day after tomorrow, every corner gets cut – including the whole mock-up and approval process. The first time the show organisers saw this site was when it went live the morning of the deadline. I vastly prefer to sacrifice development over design time, so this site is built on a completely customised stock template, and the order form and all calculations are driven by FormSpring.

The Show site budget was for about a day, although the site took one and a half. On the plus side, three of Cork’s finest wine merchants each owe me a bottle of their favourite white, so I can live with that :)

I finished up work for LittleQuiz.com some time ago, but they were waiting for their swanky swag to arrive so they could launch. For this project, branding, slogan, blog and website design and a bunch of product and print design was done by me; the site and system was coded by the very talented Dave of Ambient Age.

This was definitely a Stalinist web design project but Joe Scanlon is an ideal client and did indeed love what I gave him. It can also be tricky when you’re doing design and someone else is coding, but what Dave turned out looks exactly like the mock ups, to the pixel, and that isn’t easy. Plus his Ajax bits are very sexy.

When I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I was suddenly doing more voice over work than I ever expected for clients, this was really not what I had in mind.

Last week, a very hesitant but nice-sounding man rang and asked for me by name. It was pretty much the normal thing – he’d heard of me from a friend, I came highly recommended, was I available, etc. The conversation got muddled very quickly though, because as it turns out, he was very much not looking for a website.

I’m not sure if he was looking for in-call escort services, out-call escort services, or phone sex, but he was definitely seeking a service I am entirely unwilling to provide at my current hourly rate. Possibly he was looking for dominatrix services, because I got quite irritated trying to get him to say what he was actually after, and it didn’t seem to put him off one bit.

As pranks (or harassment) go, this all worked out quite well for me as I am not a huge fan of the telephone to start out with. The more it rings the less I like it. So as more and more calls started to come in, I happily turned off my mobile and switched off all the phones in the house. The one I couldn’t turn off is now in pieces on the kitchen counter. It’s been there for a week.

Our house phone mailbox is now full, and my mobile has a truly silly amount of voice mail.

Things I’ve Learned:

• People appear to have plenty of money to spend on entertainment, even in a recession;
• A surprising number of people do not withhold their numbers when phoning out for something decidedly more indulgent than a pizza;
• I really should convert my work phone to a premium rate service…

So, if you’ve been trying to reach me and have not been able to, your message is in quite a queue and it’s likely I won’t be retrieving it, so you may want to drop me an email or try again. Happy phoning!