MA Submission - David Turner
The following is a collection of all of the work I am submitting as a part of my Masters Project Module. Much of this work has been submitted in printed form, but the online nature of my work requires that some be submitted digitally.
Journal Articles
My final semester on the MA was rather sparse when it comes to quantity of posts made, as much of my time was invested in building services, not in documenting them. None the less I did find time to write a series of articles that I published to my Journal:
- Introducing Simply Written - On the first year of the course I came up with the idea of a web application that would allow authors to write digital books. Over the summer I was able to spend some time developing it and, at the beginning of the semester I was able to release it. This article served as an introduction.
- Building Simply Written - Releasing, and promoting, Simply Written was a rather important moment for me, but it wasn't the only aspect of the project that was important to me. The development process of the service was just as important. This article looks into some of the development details of the service.
- Just Fucking Ship It - Having a great idea means nothing if you never act upon it. All too often I hear great tales, and amazing ideas, laid out in a way that stuns those around them… only to never see anything more happen. I'm a big fan of seeing ideas become reality and an increased frustration with not seeing things happen resulted in this article.
- Simple Smart Quotes - When we shipped Get Invited updates for Get Invited's December event we paid a lot of attention to ensuring that the overall design was of a high quality. We did, however, miss one facet of the design out, quotation marks. I spent some time looking into how to resolve this and this article covers my findings.
Plugin Releases
So much of what I do is code, it serves as the foundation of my practice. Between working on products during my time on the Masters and working on freelance projects I started to identify a trend in some of my work. I was repeating myself. I dislike repeating work when it's possible, so I took steps to prevent this. It resulted in me releasing two jQuery Plugins:
- jQuery Select - Select boxes are an important, and yet frustrating, part of designing for the web. They provide a great deal of functionality and offer almost no control over how they look. After growing frustrated with implementing fixes in multiple freelance projects I created this plugin to automate the process for me.
- jQuery Show of Slides - A simple google search will provide hundreds of jQuery plugins that handle slideshows, so why did I create my own? Many plugins currently available try to do too much at once, and the slideshow suffers as a result. They also tend to be tailored towards doing a single thing, if you try and use these plugins to do something different, you immediately start running into issues. This plugin was built to assume nothings about how it will be used, whilst providing a key set of functionality.
Demo Account Information
In order to demonstrate what Get Invited and Simply Written are capable of, I have set up a demo account for each of the systems, which I will populate with some demo information. These accounts will also be used during the showcase, so additional information will likely be added throughout the time it is running.
Get Invited Demo Account
Simply Written Demo Account
Masters Project Slideshows
As a part of my Masters Project Submission there are a total of three presentations that I will be making use of. Two of these are in use as a part of my showcase, and run when I am not at the showcase, with the final serving as a guide through the work that I have undertaken during my time on the course. These files can be downloaded below:
Supporting Documentation
In addition to the presentations I have put together several supporting documents that have been submitted in a printed format. I have attached them here fore completeness: