Nad/Work

Hi, I'm Aran :-)

I live in Devonport and spend my days working on the project which involves a lot of philosophical thought about organisation (such as The Nodal Model, wiki organisation and semantic organisation) and development on various MediaWiki extensions. In 2007 I became one of the official developers so I could maintain some extensions directly in the MediaWiki SVN repository.

Of course, I have to spend some time each week on paid work too, but I try and restrict it to MediaWiki and wiki-based organisation so that it doesn't cause the other projects to stagnate. Most of my jobs come through other people affiliated with the project and usually involves setting up MediaWiki's with varying levels of organisational structure.

I also do work through RentACoder and ScriptLance and do a bit of MediaWiki skinning work as long as it only involves implementing an existing design, and also do a fair bit of remote server installation and administration.

Here's some links to some of my stuff...

• My Category
• My Résumé
• Work I do
• My RentACoder profile
• My ScriptLance profile

I've written many MediaWiki extensions over the last few years, the public ones are listed on my mediawiki.org user page. If you need any specific customisation to your MediaWiki I may be able to help, let me know your requirements on my talk page. The extensions I'm currently working on are:

• CategoryWatch
• MediaWikiLite
• SimpleSecurity
• Workflow
• TreeAndMenu

Using the MediaWiki software for managing the content of your website or managing internal documentation is becoming increasingly popular. Over the last year or so, a number of jobs have come by which involve the same general requirements: changing the design of a MediaWiki to match existing artwork and modifying the security settings for example so that none of the wiki features are available to the general public. If you'd need these kinds of things done, you can contact me on my talk page. Such jobs can be done reasonably quickly and are usually around US$250 (plus $15/month or $150/yr if you'd also like the wiki set up and hosted). Note that this price estimate is based on standard requirements such as those shown below, if additional functionality is required involving JavaScript or extensions, then these features need to be priced separately.

Skinning mash-ups I've recently started doing skinning work for web applications other than MediaWiki including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, which all cost around the same as skinning MediaWiki. This is very useful for skinning mash-ups which are very popular in the new Web 3.0 envrionment. Below is an example mash-up skin from openmethodology.org made to look identical for MediaWiki, Wordpress and a bookmark management program called "Scuttle".