Our on-line portfolio below showcases the majority of our web projects. As such it reflects the changing nature of the field of internet design, be it due to new standards, technologies or legislation. It should be noted that all the projects were designed to the highest standards at their time of production (W3C validation, Accessibility, Legislation, etc), and made to work at their best with the browsers existing at that time.

Major On-line Projects

Participamos.com
 

This secure on-line system was entirely developed by MiForja.com. It represents our boldest incursion to date into PHP development (which could now be said to be on a par with our ASP know-how), and was developed so as to be sold as a service. It embodies many philosophies, such as object oriented design and adherence to the latest W3C standards, and is a useful test bed for new techniques and technologies.

Among the more notable features are the user authorisation systems, the modules developed to handle different users with different roles (which are defined by and per client company), the internationalisation modules which allow the user interface language to be changed by end users, the calendar modules, the form validation modules, and the file sharing modules. It also has a billing/invoicing module which is integrated with PayPal so as to accept subscription payments, and this will be turned into a further facility for the client companies in the near future (so as to allow them to send out their own invoices and accept payments).

Main technologies used: PHP, MySQL, SSL, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX
Participamos.com / (2006 - 2007)
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A multilingual secure on-line system for managing joint ventures. This project was initially developed to address the needs of an investment group whose partners were distributed over a large geographical area (Argentina, Germany, Canada and South Korea). It was however designed with the intention of offering its services to other investment groups.

Using this system, a client company can keep track of the hours worked by its employees, how they were spent (projects and tasks), and can provide summaries and detailed views of all the activities entered. Also useful are the ability to share news items and files, to export results to Excel and XML, and from an individual user's point of view, the facility to view their own totals (even across multiple companies/ventures). The service is now also being marketed under the name of

Northumberland Rock Art
 

Horacio Ayestaran was the ICT Manager for this project and was responsible for all computing aspects, including the specification phase (in conjunction with Dr Aron Mazel of Newcastle University), the design and development of the content management system (database and website), the image processing (except bubbleworlds and the InterACTIVE Zone, which were created by Heritage Media) and the setting up of the servers.

It also included an Access front-end with a user friendly user interface, so as to ease the data entry process. Also noteworthy are the online mapping facilities, and its adherence to standards and accessibility considerations.

Main technologies used: ASP, ASP.Net, MSSQL, Access, XHTML, CSS, on-line mapping
Northumberland Rock Art (2002 - 2004)
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A highly successful on-line catalogue of rockart sites in Northumberland, England. It also comprises an interactive learning area. This Newcastle University project was funded to the tune of £160k by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and was completed in conjunction with the University of Newcastle and Heritage Media (who provided the graphic design and the creation/handling of the audio, audiovisual and bubbleworld materials).

This website was the winner of the prestigious Channel 4 Archaeological Awards 2006 in the ICT category (see also here page 12), and has received huge amounts of praise worldwide from academics and the general public alike. It was very gratifying to see this become one of the most popular and important websites on Prehistoric Rock Art in the world, and is a tribute to great cooperation, teamwork and dedication from all those involved.

SINE Project
 

Horacio Ayestaran was the ICT Manager for this project and was responsible for all of its computing aspects, including the specification phase (in conjunction with the rest of the SINE team), risk assessment, the design and development of the content management system (database and website), the graphic design, the image processing, the development of the IT framework used for the InterACTIVE Zone, the digital archiving, and the setting up of the servers.

It also included a sophisticated Access front-end with a user friendly user interface, so as to ease the data entry process. Also noteworthy are the extensive online mapping facilities, the image zooming facilities, and its adherence to standards and accessibility considerations.

Main technologies used: ASP, ASP.Net, MSSQL, Access, on-line mapping, Image Web Server, Flash, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
SINE Project (2002 - 2004)
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A large heritage project funded by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF-Digitise) and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to the tune of £560k. This resulted in a large on-line catalogue of images of structures from the North East of England. It also comprises a large interactive learning area.

This website was one of the very few NOF-digi projects to receive extra funding at its conclusion, in recognition for the good work carried out. It is also recommended worldwide by many institutions and major websites (such as the Royal Institute of British Architects, Pevsner, Wikipedia, Intute, the Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe, Ancestry.co.uk, and received The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology Site of the Month Archive December 2004 award)

Church Plans On-line
 

As ICT Manager for the SINE Project, Horacio Ayestaran was also responsible for the creation of the Church Plans On-line website. This involved porting the existing Access database to Microsoft SQL Server, and designing the website as specified by the team at Lambeth Palace Library. It also involved the processing of all the images (largely automated using purpose written Actions in Adobe Photoshop) so as to clean them up and prepare them for delivery via Image Web Server, the digital archiving, and the setting up of the servers.

This site marks a watershed in terms of technologies and standards, as it uses frames (still accepted as good practice at the beginning of the project – in fact the first version of the site was written as HTML 4.0, and was later upgraded to XHTML 1.0). It may seem slightly outdated by today's standards, but it is still an important and worthwhile resource.

Main technologies used: ASP, MSSQL, Access, Image Web Server, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
Church Plans On-line (2002 - 2004)
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As part of the SINE Project, this website was set up in conjunction with Lambeth Palace to put online some 12,600 plans and architectural drawings from the archive of the Incorporated Church Building Society (ICBS) spanning the period 1818-1982, and covering England and Wales. It also comprises an interactive learning area. It was funded by the New Opportunities Fund and Friends of Lambeth Palace Library to the tune of £80K.

This website is recommended worldwide by many institutions and major websites (such as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Wikipedia, Intute, Pevsner, English Heritage, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe)

School of Historical Studies - Newcastle University - now offline
 
School of Historical Studies - Newcastle University

This system built upon the system originally developed for the Archaeology Department, but was also adapted to be more generic so as to easily port it to any institution. The other major adaptation was the integration with the university campus' network Active Directory (this improved the security, and at the same time simplified maintenance and removed the need for extra user passwords and login facilities). The system was also upgraded to XHTML 1.0, and had some of the graphical design performed by the university's web team.

This facility raised the bar in terms of departmental websites, and was kept in operation for a few years, until eventually all departments were forced to move to a central UNIX based university wide system (hence the original site is no longer on-line).

Main technologies used: ASP, MSSQL, Access, XHTML, CSS
School of Historical Studies - Newcastle University (2001 - 2002, now offline)
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A database driven solution was developed to provide the website for the School of Historical Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. This allowed all members of staff to easily maintain their own personal pages, enter information about their projects, publications, seminars, etc, from easy to use Access Forms. It was integrated with the university campus' network for user identification and authentication (users did not need to login to update their details, their campus login was used instead). It built upon the system originally developed for the Archaeology Department, but was also adapted to be more generic so as to easily port it to any institution. The original website is no longer online and has now been replaced by a central system.

Archaeology Department - Newcastle University - now offline
 
Archaeology Department - Newcastle University

This solution represented a major development for us in terms of multi-user facilities and the use of sophisticated Access Forms to enter data into the MS SQL database. Horacio Ayestaran developed the entire system: specification phase, content management design and development (database and website), graphic design, and the setting up and maintenance of the servers.

The site also made use of frames (still an acceptable solution at the time, as among other things it reduced the bandwidth used by menus - these were pre-broadband days for the majority of the population) and although it maintained good compatibility with Netscape 4 and above, it was made to work best with Internet Explorer (which was becoming clearly the most popular browser of that time).

Main technologies used: ASP, MSSQL, Access, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Archaeology Department - Newcastle University (2001, now offline)
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As the age of the internet was taking hold in academic institutions, the importance of having an attractive and up to date website was became clear. Because of this the Department of Archaeology at Newcastle commissioned a database driven solution to allow their staff to easily keep their details up to date. Data entry was performed by means of user friendly Access forms. This website was superseded by the School of Historical Studies website.

Museo Nacional Del Petróleo
 

This was our first web commission, back in the days when Netscape was by far the most popular browser, bandwidth was very limited (particularly in Argentina, the target users) and frames were very much the norm to web solutions. Our approach used substantial amounts of JavaScript for positioning text on the page (and deal with Netscape/Internet Explorer incompatibilities). We also designed it with the then average monitor size in mind (640x400) meaning that today it may does not make the best use of the web canvas (CSS was largely unheard of at the time and the only way to reliably scale things would have been to use extra JavaScript, which was beyond our remit).

We put this entire site together (159 individual web pages) in just 14 days (including the photography, image processing, text, design, etc) and the result was what at the time reigned unchallenged as the most comprehensive oil museum web site in the world.

Main technologies used: HTML, JavaScript
Museo Nacional Del Petróleo (2000)
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This web project was one of our earliest external web undertakings, and involved the collaboration with the excellent graphic designer Celina Migliaro and renowned local photographer pepepugni. We were commissioned by the Museo Nacional del Petróleo (Argentina's National Oil Museum) to create a site to give them a good web presence, and this resulted in what was for many years the best such website around the world (its only drawback for non-Spanish speaking audiences was the fact that the material only appeared in Spanish, but even then it was referenced as an educational tool from sites around the world). This very early site was developed entirely in the times when Netscape reigned supreme, as well as the use of frames, the smaller average monitor sizes, and the lack of general public broadband (meaning that images had to be very much optimised, sometimes overly so by today's standards). As such it may lack the impact it once had, but is nonetheless still a valuable resource.

Mipatagonia.com
 

This website started us on the road to large, sophisticated web development, and it has often been the test bench for our consultancy (and as such has undergone many transformations). For example, before CSS or Flash became mainstream, the only way to reliably position things on a page and have it scale up with screen size was to use JavaScript, hence our first solution made substantial use of purpose built routines (this solution is still available here). The precise positioning and scaling was particularly necessary because of the bold design created by Celina Migliaro (at the time there was little agreement as to what good web design ought to be, and we were trying to build a statement with an innovative front page). However, once Macromedia Flash became widely supported, it proved an ideal solution for the site's front page (and is still the solution being used today).

Along with the use of JavaScript was the use of frames (in part for extra functionality and navigation, as well as to reduce the use of bandwidth and to hide the JavaScript code from most casual onlookers - given the browsers available at the time). This could of course be much better implemented now (the new site is currently undergoing testing and will be live by end of July 2007). Another particularly innovative use of these routines can be seen in the series of pages available here (in Spanish, but click on the arrows at the bottom left of the pages to proceed).

Further to this, this site was also designed with the web engines and crawlers of the time in mind. In particular, at the beginning of the project most of these could not index database generated pages (Google became mainstream once our initial site was live). Hence our approach was to generate static pages from our database (a highly sophisticated system that allowed us to store a variety of 'different shaped' structured data in a few tables, which among other things made expansion very easy), and then upload them. This also worked well with the added facilities which allowed end users to change their details (they could change the online copy of the database, but we would vet the changes prior to making them live). Another aspect that was noteworthy was the use of MySQL for the online database (to lower hosting costs) and MSSQL as well as an Access front end on our own machine, from which the pages were produced and uploaded. This approach has now been abandoned, and the future re-launch of the system will be entirely driven by the online database.

Finally, among the many other points to add is that the site also had a companion version in English called www.inpatagonia.com (also driven from the same database) and was designed to allow for pages to be output in multiple languages. The site has not been maintained since 2001 (other than server migrations, which proved complicated since the scripting languages offered by the hosting company changed and broke most of the pages), but a new version is currently being trialled and due for release by end of July 2007. This new version is fully compliant with today's standards, techniques and legislation, and has new features such as online mapping (satellite imagery) from Google Maps.

Main technologies used: Main technologies used: ASP, iASP, PERL, MSSQL, Access, MySQL, On-line mapping, Flash, HTML, JavaScript. Latest additions include porting to PHP, and rewriting as XHTML and CSS.
Mipatagonia.com (2000 - 2001)
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This large and ambitious web project was the first to be tackled by the MiForja.com team. In these early days of the internet (Netscape was still the main browser, and Google had not yet become mainstream) the aim was to create the most important website about this southernmost region of South America. Among the innovations was the ability for members of the public to update details, an area allowing users to sell goods, etc. Also, in order to be indexed by the crawlers of the time, all pages were static (although they were created from a large and sophisticated database). It proved a perfect platform to test new technologies, and although it has received little maintenance since 2001 is currently being upgraded to bring it into line with current standards and practices, as well as having the pages driven directly by the database.

E-Learning Projects

FALCON e-learning Indexing object system
 

This project involved the complete re-write of an indexing tool previously developed by the OWL consortium (a project carried out by the G6). The tool was redesigned so as to be able to handle any e-learning resource having an IMS manifest XML file, and to meet the latest design standards and legislation requirements (among other things it was ported to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2). Further to this, substantial amounts of work went into securing the system (highly insecure prior to the re-write), as the original had not been written with security implication in mind.

Among the most noteworthy points are its sophisticated parsing routines to extract data from the IMS manifest XML files (as well as VCard data) using PHP, and its ability to work both on Windows and Linux/Unix servers.

Main technologies used: PHP, MySQL, XQuery, XHTML, CSS
FALCON e-learning objects indexer: (2007 - intranet only)
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This project involved the complete re-development of a tool to index thousands of e-learning resources available in the intranet of the member colleges of the G6 group of Further Education institutions in the North East of England. Because of copyright issues and the nature of the project, the system is only available on those colleges' intranet.

The resulting product was a fast and easy to use system that could allow administrators to easily place the resources into categories (and modify those categories at will), whilst the end users could easily perform searches for materials and preview them at will. Funding is currently being sought by the colleges to further develop this tool.

EPICS
 

This pilot project was largely exploratory in nature, and also it involved data which for security and privacy reasons are not available online. Nonetheless a final report (218K pdf) is available, and in it you can read some of the findings about e-portfolio transfers that we worked on.

Horacio Ayestaran was one of the project officers, and worked mainly in the data transfer process between different e-portfolio solutions (Blackboard content management system, ePET, LUSID and PebblePAD). The majority of the technical work involved the development of XSLT routines to transform the IMS LIP formatted XML data to tagged XHTML (which allowed the original data to be recovered if so wished).

Main technologies used: XML, XSLT, XPath XQuery, XHTML, CSS
EPICS: (2005 - 2006)
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Also known as the North East regional collaboration around e-portfolio progression pathways with illustrative case studies, the EPICS project was a pilot undertaking funded by JISC which looked into all aspects involving the potential transfer of e-portfolios between institutions. It was carried out by a group of institutions from the North East of England and as well as encompassing technical issues, it also looked into other issues such as legality, justification and security.

LSN Learning Tutorials
 

Development of a series of audiovisual tutorials for the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) covering topics such as how to use Microsoft Office Applications and how to secure a Microsoft Windows XP system.

Main technologies used: Camtasia, Microsoft Office
LSN Learning Tutorials (2006)
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Development of a series of audiovisual tutorials for the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) covering topics such as how to use Microsoft Office Applications and how to secure a Microsoft Windows XP system.

VLSP Learning Tutorials
 

Horacio Ayestaran was brought in at the end of this project to try and make sure that all the resources were of a suitable standard and were properly packaged for their delivery to the Learning and Skills Network. Because of the distributed nature of the project and time constraints, some resources could not be sent back to the authors, and other solutions were found instead. For example, for some resources new graphics were created (because the old ones infringed copyright) and these had sometimes to be inserted into the resources by hand editing the original packages (at times Flash, at times Visual Basic, where the source code was not available).

Main technologies used: XHTML, CSS, Reload, IMS Packaging, XML, Flash, Visual Basic, VBA, Microsoft Office.
VLSP Learning Tutorials (2006 - CD only)
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This project involved assessing the quality of a set of e-learning resources being developed by the G6 group of Further Education institutions in the North East of England, as well as the creation of a few extra resources to complement the set. In particular it required working with some of the authors to improve the coding and compliance of their products. The final task was the packaging of all the resources using Reload. The work had been commissioned by the Learning and Skills Network.

Other recent projects include:

Latinos en York
 

A simple site which for now runs as static HXTML, but will soon include PHP and MySQL functionality to drive news items, blogs, classified ads, etc.

Main technologies used: XHTML, CSS2
Latinos en York (2007)
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This web site was developed to create a meeting point for all latinamerican and spanish/portuguese speakers in York and its sourroundings.

Forest of Galtres Camera Club
 

A pilot project aiming to develop a generic solution for camera club websites. As well as having a public area to showcase photos and events, it also comprises a members area where members can build their own portfolios, view club documents, referees can judge competition entries, etc.

Main technologies used: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS2, Mapping (Google maps)
Forest of Galtres Camera Club (2006 - 2007)
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A pilot project aiming to develop a generic solution for camera club websites. As well as having a public area to showcase photos and events, it also comprises a members area where members can build their own portfolios, view club documents, referees can judge competition entries, etc.

El Gaucho - York
 

A very simple website for a great restaurant. This particular website was used as a pilot to test and bring up to date some new CSS2 techniques.

Main technologies used: XHTML, CSS2
El Gaucho - York (2006)
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A very simple website for a great restaurant. This particular website was used as a pilot to test and bring up to date some new CSS2 techniques and cross-browser compatibility.

KK Barbe-Q Easingwold
 

A small yet sophisticated website which was used as a pilot project in the use of XML, XSLT, and its compatibility with third party packages (to allow the client to update the site with ease, without having to resort to a database driven solution).

Main technologies used: XHTML, CSS2, XML, XSLT
KK Barbe-Q Easingwold (2005)
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A small yet sophisticated website which was used as a pilot project in the use of XML, XSLT, and its compatibility with third party packages (to allow the client to update the site with ease, without having to resort to a database driven solution).

Descubre York
 

A small HTML5 and CSS3 solution, used as a pilot study into the basic capabilities of HTML5. This site was created in Spanish for a York tourist guide. Sitio para un guía de turismo de York en español y portugés.

Main technologies used: HTML5, CSS3.
Descubre York
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A small HTML5 and CSS3 solution.

 

 

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