About this site
Originally this site was purely for supplementing my résumé, but as more and more scripts were added it gradually morphed into something a great deal more useful. Now I use it as an online repository for the software I write, my music and other hobbies.
See the Web Portfolio section for some screenshots and discussion of older incarnations of this site. In its current form, I think I've ironed out most of the earlier problems in areas such as navigation, user-friendliness and overall look and feel. But, well, there's always room for improvement...
So what's with the logo?
Back in 2004 while I was in the process of moving apartments, someone drove off
with my moving van which I had spent all day packing tightly with all my possessions.
This included some 3D geometric polyhedral puzzles I had spent several months designing and
building. So in a homage of sorts, I modelled the logos for this site and
Form Tools on two of them.
See the Puzzles page
for some videos of the old designs and some new ones I'm working on.
Boring stuff about how this site works
Technologies Used
PHP, JS / AJAX, MySQL. The trifecta!
Software Used
Most of the site is custom-built, but I utilized a few existing programs here and there for the odd task. Let's see...
| Form Tools | Ah, Form Tools. Used for processing and storing the data from all forms on my site. |
| WordPress | Used on my homepage, letting me painlessly publish content. I use the iG:Syntax Hiliter plugin which uses GeSHI for syntax highlighting of code snippets within posts. By an odd coincidence, I wrote the original JavaScript and Perl libraries for GeSHI. Small world! |
| Script.aculo.us | Superb set of JavaScript libraries which I use all over the place, like with hiding & showing the site nav bar. Well worth checking out, despite the appalling documentation. |
| PHP and JS Validation | A pair of functions that I wrote about 5123987 years ago which are just as useful today. These are used to validate user input on various web forms. |
| JS Post-its | Used in my Data Generator, among other places. |
The Joy of HTML Templates
Every page on this site is generated through a simple templating system. You (or rather, I) can override the default styles by setting a single variable on each page. All my previous sites used templates to one degree or other, but never so thoroughly or consistently. The convenience really is unparalleled - I can create a new page in 30 seconds with whatever style I need. It actually makes me feel like a lazy sod for not implementing it before...
Some pages look better in one style or other - such as the games Scroggle and Memory.
