The New Zealand Running Calendar and Australian Running Calendar are my babies, and I spent most of my time working on them.

The New Zealand website started in 2010 in response to there being no definitive list of running websites in NZ – I’m a keen runner myself and this was a pretty frustrating situation. I came up with the idea of the website in 2008, but it took a while to get things going, and it was finally launched on April 18th, 2010, just before I went off to run at a Run Auckland race!

I realised there was no point having an event listing website with not a lot of events on it, so from the very beginning went out and pro-actively found events to add to the list. This is still a job I take very seriously and continue to work on to this day, adding new functionality and keeping the event listings up to date.

The Australian website followed in 2012, initially run as a completely separate website, but now running off a common database.

2010 to 2016

The website was originally run off the SilverStripe CMS, with separate copies for both the NZ & Australian websites.

Technologies used (links are external):

November 2016 on

There came a point where I knew I needed to rebuild the system. I hummed and hawed a lot and tried out various systems including WordPress and Laravel, but in the end decided a completely bespoke system was the only way forward.

It now runs off a single code base / database with different content being served depending on the domain name. The new system is stupendously fast, and includes member login functionality with two tiers of membership (free & premium).

Technologies used (links are external):