A hobby, a profession and a life long learning experience

Web development fascinates me and takes up FAR too much of my free time!

As you can see from my site, I have a few web development skills. I'm certainly not up there with the hardened pros, but I manage! I built my first web site in 1994, and have been at it ever since. Web technology has come a long way since then, and it has been a wild ride. In fact, I don't expect the innovation to slow down for the rest of my life. The infrastructure that is in place right now is oriented towards innovation and creation. As more and more people take part in the life of the web we will see increasingly evolved forms of information exchange and expression on the web. I genuinely believe we are seeing the first benefits of an evolutionary quantum leap in the information world. Hundreds of years from now this time will be seen as one of the great explosions of digital genetics... the source code of the future is evolving exponentially right now!

Some of my humble efforts

Just a few of the many sites I've had a hand in... other than this one!

teachingfish ... a comprehensive resource for English teachers. At its height, I was getting over a million hits a month. I couldn't make enough money from advertising to pay for the hosting costs and so I mothballed the site. :-( Most of the site is functional... certainly enough to demonstrate the online English grammar cross-referenced to teaching games and activities.

ELC ... a company web site I put together for one of my employers in Thailand

SALC ... a Self Access Learning Centre web site I built for Payap University

WebQuest ... an example of a Web Quest I did as part of my M.Ed.

Tools and Technologies

It has come SO FAR in just a few years

Back in the day when RAM cost $400.00 for 1 megabyte, I built my first web page. I wrote it by hand on a black and while Mac SE! Crazy!!! Since then, a great number of tools have been developed to help you build sites. In particular there are wonderful, extremely powerful open source tools that you can just plug in. For example, my blog is powered by WordPress. An industrial strength blog tool that is open source. That means it is free! For the average person, setting up and hosting your own blog is as easy as signing up for a good hosting service and then using their site management tools to install it for you. My web host offers such a service. All I had to do was click a link and PRESTO I had a world class blog tool at my fingertips. I modified it a lot... because I'm a geek and I can't help myself, but I needn't have. WordPress worked perfectly with one click of a mouse! If you don't want to have your own site, WordPress.com will even host your blog for you FOR FREE.

That was just one example... there are many many more! Here are a few I find interesting:

Wordpress

The best open source blog tool available

Open Office

Who needs Microsoft when you can get this muscular office suite... it's so good that many government departments in Europe are switching to it!

Firefox

A fast, free and VERY popular web browser

Windows Live Writer

If you get interested in blogging try this excellent tool from the generous folks at Microsoft. It's a superb tool that allows you to compose entries for your blog offline. That makes blogging faster, easier and a lot more fun.

Gallery 2

This is an ourstanding open source photo gallery toolset. It has a huge community behind it and is being improved and extended all the time. It drives the gallery section of my site! I got fed up with the UAE government blocking Flickr online photo gallery, so I just installed and built my own!