One thing we love is to really flex our coding muscles, so when multi-award-winning marketing company Euro RCSG Riley (ERR) approached us to develop a micro-blogging platform in just one week we couldn’t refuse. Read more…

Steve from Vingo.tv approached us with a problem - their existing Java chat widget had broken and they felt it was time for something faster with better cross-browser compatibility and improved reliability. Read more…

Things have been a a bit crazy at BB HQ the last few months - especially considering that I had assumed I was going to be able to take August off (whilst Benjie enjoys his wedding and honneymoon!).  Hopefully I’ll find time (and get permission) to blog about some of our latest and greatest projects, but in lieu of that here’s a quick list:

• a large multi-server high uptime blogging platform for a household name (corporate)
• fast scalable realtime chat software (startup)
• realtime SMS messaging/microblogging platform for events (marketing company)
• a blog design/template (startup)
• another blog design/template (mine!)

Also, we’ve got a few posts waiting to be published containing some awesome scripts that make testing and installing WPMU instances much easier.  They’ll definitely be worth waiting for ;-)

At BrainBakery we specialise in PHP, MySQL, AJAX and other web technologies, but occasionally we do a bit of design for our clients and our own web apps; for example, the sumo.tv facebook app was one we had full design reign over. However, for the most part we partner with design expert friends of ours like Caffeine Hit and Display Digital. But we’re a big fan of tinkering with designs, so specialising in code sometimes leaves us with a vacuum of design lust.. which is invariably sated by re-designing the BrainBakery site a few times a year.

What follows is a gallery of some of our old and more well-loved designs for BrainBakery.com: Read more…

We’ve finally replaced our aging site with this shiny new one; we hope you like it! Apologies if it’s a bit rough around the edges, but we had to launch it sharpish due to the large amount of traffic we’re getting from Techcrunch and elsewhere today. I’ll tidy it up soon. Promise ; )

Following the success of Blog Friends V1, we again joined Luke and i-together to create a new app - Buzzspotr. Buzzspotr combines instant messaging and locations to enable you to quickly and easy see where the buzz is. The project was inspired by Lloyd Davis and Mike Butcher during the early days of starting the Social Media Cafe. As they are both avid users of twitter (like many of the Social Meda community in London), and they needed a way to organize gatherings of social media types, it was natural to combine twitter with Google Maps. Read more…

We’ve been working with Luke Razzell from i-together for a few months now, supporting the Blog Friends facebook app with ongoing updates. With the app having been live for about 5 months now, we thought it’d be great to spruce things up a bit and take advantage of the latest features of facebook’s API.

Blog Friends V1 amounts to a significant re-write of the entire front-end along with major portions of the back-end. The app is now effectively a full-blown feed-reader, entirely within facebook, and is currently the most advanced facebook app we know of (or so our users tell us).

I’m beginning to think we’re getting a bit of a reputation for quick service! User-generated television network Sumo. tv approached us to produce a facebook application to coincide with a number of press releases…

… of course, being Christmas the obvious thing was to make an advent calendar application, giving us just a couple of days to design, test and release the app! Thanks to Adam from Sumo, we had a pretty open brief so Jof was able to design and illustrate the app in a day, with Gavin coding and testing it.

When Channel4 approached us, their goal was clear; their current blog system was causing them issues, and they needed to launch a new blog to coincide with their recent mission to reach out to their audience and get their thoughts about the future of Channel4. The blog solution had to share aesthetics with the existing C4 properties, and the hardware had to withstand tens of thousands of hits per hour during the peak periods. However - and here was the catch - it had to be launched from scratch in a week! Read more…

There’s few things I like doing more during the daytime than turning my hand to a bit of JavaScript, so when karaoke startup LuckyVoice asked us to create a rich interface to for their users to create their own singing lists, I had to accept.

Even with the aid of the mootools JavaScript library, this was a fairly hefty bit of work. Peter wanted an AJAX search; songs that could be added with double-click, drag and a button; re-ordering; animations… you name it. Oh, and it had to work in pretty much every known browser! Feel free to check out the live version at LuckyVoice Playlist.