Welcome to the brand spanking new bigbluedev.com. Please bear with me while I iron out any creases. Subscribe to my RSS Feed to be kept up to date.

about BIG BLUE why hire BIG BLUE? recent work

about BIG BLUE

  • BIG BLUE web developement is the home of freelance developer Michael Vigor.
  • Whether you're looking for a website for yourself, or a designer or agency looking to partner, I am always looking to take on new and exciting projects.
  • An experienced PHP and Ruby on Rails developer with a good knowledge of standards based web design, interested in the latest web technologies.
More >

why BIG BLUE?

  • Freelance is the way to go: receive a professional service at a reduced rate. Lower overheads than a web design agency means clients pay less for more.
  • A friendly and reliable service. Flexibility to work as required to meet deadlines.
  • Cutting edge development knowledge, up to date with all the latest best practices for building clean, valid and search engine friendly websites.
More >

recent work

Adbasement.com
AdBasement.com

A brand new webservice developed in PHP using the Code Igniter development framework.
Developed in less than 2 weeks in order to be ready to launch for beta testing.

More >

Recent Posts

19 Mar

Barcamp Brighton & Geokit

I went to my first Barcamp at the weekend and it was really good - 150 people “geeking it up” for two days solid.
read more

8 Mar

Barcamp Brighton 2 - 1 week to go

Next weekend I will be attending my first Barcamp event in Brighton. Barcamps are user generated conferences for people who are interested in the latest web technologies.

This will be the second Barcamp to be held in Brighton, and although the number of places were increased to 150 this time around, they were still all taken in 9 minutes, so I’m pretty pleased I got a ticket.

The Barcamp philosophy is “No spectators, only participants”, so every attendee is expected to give a talk or run a session. So all I’ve got to do now is find something I can talk about…?

Barcamp Brighton 2

27 Jan

5 reasons you should use Google Apps for your email

With Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for Your Domain), you can setup all the emails for your own domain to be handled by Google, which is what I’ve done for all emails to bigbluedev.com. Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well, let me break it down for you!
read more

24 Jan

Setup nginx for php and rails on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10

Nginx is a high performance webserver and an alternative to using Apache to serve your sites. If, like me, you are hosting from a VPS with minimal memory and want a lightweight server with maximum performance then nginx is for you!

Having spent a good few hours sorting this out on my new VPS I thought I’d summarize the process here with links to the most helpful posts from around the web. I wanted to be able to setup virtual hosts for both php and rails sites, without Apache being installed on the machine.

read more

14 Jan

Referer Message Wordpress Plugin

Having a welcome message at the top of a blog the first time you visit seems to be all the rage right now. I wanted to be able to do something similar but be able to show a different welcome message depending on what site people come to mine from. So here is a plugin for Wordpress which will do just that… read more

8 Jan

Inaugural introductory blog post

MJV Web Design has now morphed into BIG BLUE web development.

Its bigger, its bluer, and it will be the home of big things to come. I hope to grow and improve the site over the next few weeks so please check back for updates (or alternatively subscribe to my RSS feed), but just having the website live is good enough for now!

read more

Other Projects

Tumbleam.com

Tumbleam.com

An experiment in mashups, feed aggregation and web apis. Built in ruby on rails.