What I do
I'm somewhere between a generalist and a specialist — a generalising specialist, if you will :).
My skills cover: front–end development, back–end development, project management, user experience, information architecture; and lots more.
I love design and typography. I did graphics at GCSE, so I can draw a straight line.
Front-end skills in depth
- Advanced XHTML and HTML. It's clean, semantic, accessible and standards compliant.
- Advanced JavaScript. Like everybody else, I had my own JavaScript library back in '99 — I prefer to use jQuery now.
- Advanced CSS. I'm with the progressive–enhancement and graceful–degradation schools, so use the full capabilities of CSS where possible.
- Intermediate to advanced Flash. I used to do a lot of Flash development (scripting and animation) in the Flash 5 and 6 eras, but less so now. My interest in Flash has been rekindled thanks to Box2DFlash and Papervision3D. I hate Flash–only sites with a vengeance though.
Back-end skills in depth
- Good PHP. I used to write my own content management systems until I discovered Drupal. I've also dabbled with the CakePHP framework.
- Good C# .NET. Mostly websites, but I have also worked on Windows and console applications.
- Good SQL. I've been using SQL Server since version 7 and MySQL since version 3. I've also dabbled with Oracle and DB2.
- Classic ASP (usually JScript but sometimes VBScript). Haven't done this for a few years now.
- Basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration
- I've also done a bit of XML, WAP, Vignette, Coldfusion, JSP and Perl development in the past.
Content management systems skills in depth
- Drupal. I was looking for open source PHP content management systems, and Drupal was the best fit for my requirements. I've been using it for over 2 years — since version 5.1. I am an Individual Member of the Drupal Association.
- WordPress. I've used this for a few personal sites. It's definitely my second favourite web CMS.
- PivotX. I sometimes use this for sites on (cheap!) hosting packages that don't support MySQL. It's very fast and has a good development community. I used PivotX for the previous version of this website.
- Bespoke CMS's. I've built bespoke CMS's in PHP, ASP.Net, Classic ASP, and even TCL (Vignette Storyserver 5).
Design and multimedia tools skills in depth
- Photoshop and Fireworks. Fireworks is my favourite image editor, but I am equally at home with Photoshop.
- Flash. I've done lots of animation and scripting work in Flash. I much prefer to use a proper IDE like FlashDevelop than the horrid Flash IDE.
