My first Web site was built in GeoCities. After that I moved onto Flash only sites sometime in 1999. They were awful and terrible creations that I hope the world never finds. After the Flash era I moved into a variety of PHP driven content management systems and forums. At various times I have had WikiMedia, Moodle, Mambo, PHPnuke, Simple Machines, YABB, phpBB, and various other applications installed and serving up my content. During this time I learned a small amount of PHP. I had been working with a few programming languages, including GFA Basic on the Atari ST, Basic on PC clones at school, and Windows 3.1 era Visual Basic throughout my life but had never committed to mastering one.
Between June of 1996 and 2003 I was mostly focused on learning C++, but I spent a large chunk of time away from computers as I became much more focused on music. In 2003, when I discovered AGS, I shifted all of my programming efforts to learning the C like scripting language that came with that engine.
It wasn't until around 2003 or 2004 that I began to discover W3C Compliance and Accessibility. I slowly found my way back to the web and in 2005 I was hired as a Student Web Developer at the Harvey Goldberg Program in the Ohio State University's History Department. The language of choice was ColdFusion and I learned enough to debug some code. Most of my time was spent removing sites from Dreamweaver templates and bringing them up to date. During this time we began to move away from table based layouts and toward div based layouts.
In February of 2008 I was hired as a full time Web Developer for the College of Humanities at the Ohio State University. The department was still focused on ColdFusion and for the next year I dove into it. Quickly plateauing with the language and the way that it was used within the department. Eventually, an overwhelming number of problems with ColdFusion soon led the department to consider some alternatives. The decision was made to switch to PHP. Around this time the College of Humanities merged with the College of Arts to form the Arts and Humanties at the Ohio State University. I continued as a developer with Arts and Humanities, working with just the Humanities sites. Along with PHP came the adoption of Drupal as our primary content management system. I am currently assisting with the migration to Drupal by writing modules needed by all department sites.
Along with my professional adoption of Drupal I have also adopted Drupal on my personal sites and would easily consider myself a Drupal Enthusiast.
I currently find myself focused on becoming a better PHP programmer. I pride myself on my ability to create W3C valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS. I am committed to accessibility and bringing the Web to as many platforms as possible, for as many people as possible. I love learning new languages and mastering new skill sets and believe that this is a crucial trait of any programmer or technologist.
To learn more about my skills in specific areas please take a look at the following pages:
