Andrew's blog

So, I publish that I'm planning to go into full time employment, and suddenly a load of other opportunities come along. So basically, I'm still self employed full time and may be for some time longer.

Last night I worked out a new plan for the website and my business in general, some of it echoes from my last post.

Over the next 2-3 months I plan to re-build this website. When I started this site, I had a fairly different plan in mind involving working on many small websites. I now plan to only work on the bigger projects (with maybe some exceptions) and thus, much of the site is no longer needed. Therefore, a completely new clean build in Drupal 7 is in order.

The new site will have a slightly different design, be more user friendly with logins through social networks and be mainly focused around web related articles.

To start this off, I am going to attempt to add something new to the website every Monday. So stay tuned next week for hopefully a simple article to start off with on website Easter Eggs!

And a final thing to mention, I just launched my first Drupal 7 website on Friday, http://www.careertree.org.uk . This was a small project for a group of career advisors. It has a fairly simple design and is very much based around clients own personalities. I'm really pleased with the outcome and will continue to use Drupal 7 when it is appropriate. :)

It seems that I spend all my time programming, doing paper work and speaking to clients that I never have any time to update this blog. Hopefully that will change soon, as I have decided to go into full time employment. That doesn't mean I'm getting rid of Ampzone.com though.

In taking on some regular employment, I hope to be able to give that job my all while at the office, and then at home be able to put some time towards my own projects (probably at the weekends). I have one project in closed alpha testing at the moment which I look forward to finishing and putting into an open beta test in the summer.

I also hope to put a bit more time into this blog and my twitter. I really want to start sharing some of my code and tutorials which I think people will find interesting. I'm also thinking about some plans with YouTube. But that's in early stages at the moment.

I have other project ideas as well, but for now, I will just concentrate on the one (slightly smaller) project that I have made good progress on so far. I'm also thinking of redesigning this site, as I have some new ideas and feel I can do better now.

So changes coming, this will hopefully mean more updates, but may be a few months yet before it happens.

In other news, a project I have been heavily involved in has recently launched and new versions are coming out regularly. Currently in beta, SoundTrackToYour.com is open for everyone to start putting together the soundtracks to your life.

SoundtrackToYour.com is a project by Philtinium LTD which they have included me in the development of. Along with a small group of other very talented developers, we have worked towards building this web app to the specifications of the directors. We have a few new features to implement and are constantly bug fixing at the moment.

So that's all for now but I hope to be back soon.

The full Ampzone.com site is still on it's way, this slightly updated version is just preparing the way for it.

Progress of this website has been slow due to work I've been doing on other projects which are coming along well. Mainly I have been working with a group called Philtinium on a big web project launching this summer. I'll reveal more information about this in the future, but I'm looking forward to the launch.

In other news, I'm continuing to develop using Drupal which I hope to develop an release some modules for in the future. The more I learn about it, the better I find it is. I have an idea for another big project which I may build using Drupal in the near future. Drupal 7 released a short while back, still haven't had a chance to play about with it yet, but my initial look did not disappoint. Sticking to Drupal 6 at the moment though as certain key modules are not yet stable for Drupal 7 yet. I check the requirements of new projects against Drupal 7 first though so when something suitable comes along I will go with it.

My client Last Try Wines has been doing well. Their blog and twitter account are going strong and the site is beginning to establish itself. Plenty of ideas for future developments as well.

Sonic Cam Productions has launched their first full length Dr Who film which is really great and they've managed to include some amazing special effects. Updates are planned for their site very soon.

And City Access Training has gone through a few changes. I have worked on the site to significantly improve the design while changing the focus of the site to a particular area of the business. Having now settled on the content for the site, the design could be updated to really fit the content appropriately.

Hope to have Ampzone.com finished very soon now and to be blogging more frequently. I have plenty of thoughts, ideas and discoveries while working on projects so I really want to share them. And of course, I welcome feedback in the comments below. Feel free to disagree with me.