About

Jason Jacques

A young, fresh and energetic technical feasibility analyst and developer with a thirst for knowledge and a drive to achieve. An excellent problem solver with diverse technical skills and a can do attitude.

Jason thrives working in small teams where input from all areas of the company can be considered to generate the perfect, personal product for the end user, be they the two guys in the office next door or a heavily trafficked multinational website.

With a wide range of technical skills and a thorough grounding in all areas of business Jason is looking for a flexible position with a technological focus. Combined with a good eye for design and an impressive command of the written word Jason lends himself a strongly to public facing roles as he does geeking-out in the server room.

News

Creative

Copywriting

With an excellent command of the written word, Jason lends himself equally to copywriting as he does to coding. Be it an articulate and convincing portfolio, suprisingly approachable technical documentation or just plain comedic and concise web copy Jason can put a new and exciting twist on your message, whatever it may be.

Links:

• About Jason.
• Email technical documentation.
• Email website.

Maintidget

Maintidget is a maintenance widget for Mac OS X developed by Mike Vande Ven Jr. and allows users to run the Mac OS X maintenance scripts on their schedule, not Apple's.

The previous design for the widget was rather bold, featuring a black background with yellow text combined with a rather eclectic mix of typefaces. A harmonising approach was taken to bring the widget closer to the Apple design specifications while respecting key features of the of original design.

Download Maintidget Design Sheet
PDF Format (96 KB).

Mirola Website

Mirola is a now defunct digital agency located in Soho, London. Mirola specialised in development of high quality solutions to real world problems both, on the internet and over other digital mediums utilising a variety of technologies.

The website no longer captured the vibrant company Mirola was. A new design was created to give more focus on the solutions created by the company and strengthen the accessibility status which the business pushed in many of the projects it was producing, for example the Cancer Research UK fundraising website Send and Give.

As the existing design was a legacy of the technical directors involvement in development, as such the proposal used many of the design elements of the old site while freshening the brand. A limiting factor required the design to be compatible with the existing website and content. The proposal used only a replacement CSS stylesheet (and images) to allow the existing site to be moved to the new design effortlessly.

Download Mirola Design Sheet
PDF Format (268 KB).

Development

Slendertone

Slendertone is the only FDA approved, clinically proven electronic musle tone development system. The Slendertone website was give a much needed overhaul from the team at JPMH, an integrated marketing agency based in London.

The Slendertone site is an ASP.NET (C#) and MSSQL based e-commerce website run and allows users to find information, purchase and monitor their progress with the Slendertone system and ties in with their recent television campaign and feature and promotion in Marie-Claire magazine.

Links:

• The Slendertone Website.
• JPMH Ltd.

Send and Give

Send and Give is an ASP.NET (C#) and MSSQL based fundraising website run by Cancer Research UK. Originally allowing users to send eCards to each other, and optionally make a donation for the service the site was expanded to allow users to buy Alternative Gifts, such as leaflets and an hour of a nurse time.

The Send and Give project, developed by Mirola, has high compliance with all current disabilities legislation including the W3C's WAI guidelines for accessibility and generated a 5x return on investment in the launch month alone.

An innovative CMS design allows Cancer Research to modify content in a WYSIWYG fashion while maintaining standards compliance as well as providing detailed statistics allowing them to easily prioritise the most profitable cards and gifts.

The high dependance on email to deliver eCards to end users initially provided a challenge, but with expertise provided by Jason in the field of email and DNS sub-systems resulted in a delivery rate of over 99%.

The project also used geographically separated developers and a secure SVN system to allow user to commit code to a central repository along with an integrated Trac system allowing tickets to be logged and changes to be monitored via a web browser provided a robust platform to develop the system.

Links:

• The Send and Give Website.
• Send and Give in the Mirola portfolio.

Email

Email is an MIT licensed open source project created by Jason to allow email to be easily sent from PHP.

While PHP provides a built in mail function, this can be tricky to configure for users without significant experience with *nix operating systems or requires a SMTP server, with all the associated security issues, on a Windows platform. Email is a SMTP agent and directly delivers email to the address specified generating a real time response as to the delivery success.

Email provides a functionally compatible drop in replacement for the PHP mail() function which allows popular third party applications to be easily 'ported' to the email() MTA.

For a sneak peak at the new and improved version take a look at http://poss.sf.net/email.phps and see the code for yourself!

Links:

• The Email Website.
• The Email Sourceforge Page.
• Version 2.0.1 Code Preview

Tech

Technical Feasibility Analysis

A wide range of technical knowledge lends itself easily to detailed, yet concise, analysis of technical issues. Experience with a variety of development methodologies allows projects to be easily prototyped and developed to release.

Jason has provided technical analysis and prototype development of a wide variety of projects, for more details on any of the following, just ask. Please bear in mind however that due to the proprietary nature of these projects, the exact extent to which certain information can be disclosed is limited.

AOL System Integration

A recent project to integrate a proprietary job tracking system into AOL's existing media Partner Ingest Tool was required to minimise data duplication and the increased costs associated with the duplicate data entry. A prototype was developed which allows the job to be pushed from the proprietary system into the Partner Ingest Tool on job completion and dealt with automated login of AOL's complex and protected Screen Name login system. The delivered code overcame the black-box login system and allowed for chosen entry of data into AOL's system, along with verbose documentation to support continued development.

Custom Ringtone Generation

With the popularity of unusual ringtones, such as the infamous Crazy Frog, the idea to capitalise on the success brought forward a project for bespoke user generated ringtones. By combining technical know-how and experience in the telecommunications area along with an original cross-platform execution system a fully operational and scalable system was developed. Allowing users to call in, customise their ringtone and download it directly to their mobile moments later the system looks to be a surefire success.

YouTube video Player

In the wake of user generated content pushing into the mainstream, businesses are looking to capitalise on the free content generated by users world wide. A project to allow YouTube videos, along with media from many other video sharing services, to be played sequentially, like a TV station, with paid advertisements interspersed was conceived. The delivered prototype was delivered to selected end users to gauge user acceptance levels however with the advent of Joost and other video sharing services the client decided to shelve the project at the prototype stage.

Edwards Covell Architects' Network

Edwards Covell Architects, a subsidiary of UK Land Investment Group, is an architecture startup located in Soho, London. ECA provides 21st century architectural services including architectural designs, in-place natural artistic renders and moving-image services here and abroad.

ECA is a Mac-centric practice though utilises Microsoft Windows computers for Autocad and other Windows compatibility. As a subsidiary ECA also required the ability to access office resources from other premisses including home and head office.

The ECA network was designed with a Mac OS X Server at its core providing SMB compatible file sharing, printer sharing, FTP and VPN access for the office network. The server includes a RAID 1 mirrored set providing data redundancy in the case of disk failure.

Links:

• The ECA Website.

The One Page Website

This entier portfolio site is in fact a one page website. While this has a few limitations, for this particular application it provides many useful benefits.

Primarily, it provides lightening fast page loads for individual pages allowing the user to get to all the important information extremely quickly. Secondly it allows the site to be saved, in all its glory, to a local machine for later reference. However, if you prefer your websites on the more traditional dead tree medium it also prints beautifully - Print Preview to take a sneaky peak. Both of these features prevents the user being subject to bait and switch. Finally it provided an interesting experiment - one which on the whole works great.

A Beautiful MySpace

MySpace is pretty boring, and when it's not it's pretty ugly. While some designers have decided to re-skin their page I wanted a blank canvas, without the rigid layout constraints, to craft my own page on. Find out what was done, and how at http://www.myspace.com/jtjacques.

Links:

• http://www.myspace.com/jtjacques

Proof of Concept

Here is a small selection of proof of concept development Jason has had a role in. Most of these are seriously flawed but provide a good starting point for serious development of a working implementation.

YouTube, De-Logoed

There are many ways to de-logo YouTube, and as far as I'm aware both are perfectly OK. The first is to simple cover the YouTube logo with something else. This can work really well for videos shot in 16:9 as the area the logo is shown is usually covered anyway. An example of this method can be found on the political site Tony's Legacy where I was responsible for the simple page and hiding the YouTube logo for aesthetic purposes. This method does suffer alignment issues in some browsers.

The YouTube logo can also be hidden by simply not showing it in the first place. Videos played directly from the YouTube website do not display the logo. This method involves creating an iframe which loads the YouTube page for the video requested which is wrapped in a container div with an appropriate height, width and left and right offset (typically a negative margin parameter) with overflow disabled. A good example of this can be seen in the up Web Clip Widget for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 release.

Ajax Client Side Include

A project required dynamic content to be created without the use of a server side language. As a proof of concept this JavaScript demo was created allowing content to be dynamically included into the webpage using the onclick browser event.

Links:

• YouTube De-Logoed: Tony's Legacy.
• YouTube De-Logoed: Web Clip Widget
• Ajax Client Side Include

Contact

Humanities Greatest Invention

Like all of humanities greatest inventions, the internet is a medium for improving communication, bringing people together. The web shouldn't be cookie-cutter, the people using it arn't.

If you are looking for a copy of my CV please grab a copy from the About Page where it is available in Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word Format.

Get in touch by email at jtjacques@gmail.com.