Andy Gale

Web Developer, Bristol, England, UK

About me

I make and maintain initiative high-traffic websites, reliable e-Commerce stores and complicated web apps.
They are well engineered, highly-available, serve well over a million visitors a day and will scale to serve many millions more.
I primarily use PHP (often with CakePHP) and MySQL with CSS, Javascript, jQuery, XHTML and all that.
But I am really quite taken by Python, especially Django and have been using that recently.
I sometimes use Perl, C and am keen to do more in Ruby on Rails. I can also do Java.
I recommend Magento for e-Commerce but am also comfortable working with osCommerce and Zen Cart.
I do a tidy bit of systems administration on FreeBSD and Linux boxes.
I play football for a Bristol team called Greyfriars Athletic. I support Bristol Rovers. I like music. A lot.

@fivetwentyfive

A Python script that uses National Rail's Live Departures Board (along with Beautiful Soap and Python Twitter) to Twitter train delays between Bath Spa and Bristol Temple Meads so I know when to leave the office for the train home to Bristol (here is the code if you want to make your own).
CyclingNews

The world's number 1 cycling site from Future Publishing. The site is extremely popular with all types of cyclist and makes use of multiple levels of caching and other scaling technologies to ensure constant service throughout frequent busy periods such as the Tour de France.
Away Days Map

A network of maps to help traveling football fans find grounds, hotels, pubs, trains and bus stations near the away ground.
TotalFilm

A nicely executed website for the popular Future Publishing magazine. It includes reviews, trailers, film news and regularly features on IMDB and Digg.
Archers Direct

Part of the Cosmos Holidays group, Archers Direct specialise in touring holidays. Their customers have many options to customise their holiday package so the website needs to be easy to use. It takes advantage of jQuery and SEO friendly landing pages to ease customisation of each aspect of the holiday.
BikeRadar

The UK's Number 1 Cycling site from Future Publishing. Covering all disciplines of cycling and incorporating content from their market leading cycling magazines.

Before You Implement Caching On Your Website

Ideally you would have designed your website or web app from the ground up to take advantage of caching. That is not always possible in the real world so before you implement caching on the site its useful to actually find out exactly what is causing the site to be slow. This is called profiling.
Development Environments

Some thoughts about web development environments and why you should be doing your development inside a virtual machine.