Building websites is something I enjoy, and something I intend to keep doing for a long time. This section details some of the projects I've worked on, or am currently working on. I can't list everything I've worked on for various contractual reasons (i.e. boring legal reasons).

The History

I've been building websites in some form or another for the past 9 years, and have learnt a lot in that time. When I first started, it was with simple HTML and making websites that flash with colour every 5 seconds. Needless to say, that phase soon passed. I quickly moved on to dynamically generated content using ASP and an MSAccess database. I became used to that combination and built a lot of sites, however I have since moved on to other technologies and I'm pretty sure I would struggle to write something in ASP without a book by my side.

Today

Today, I build sites in PHP, using MySQL as my preferred database management system. I've recently started exploring the use of Ruby on Rails to build websites, but I'm still playing around with that. I imagine I'll be re-writing this site using RoR sometime this year. Learn by doing, right? For the front-end I use XHTML & CSS, and am fluent in both. I'm very fussy about writing standards compliant code, and using as little JavaScript as possible to maximise browser compatibility. That doesn't mean I don't *ever* use JavaScript, and have written various AJAX based sites over the last few years.

For the construction of websites, I stay well away from applications such as Dreamwaver, so called WYSIWYG editors. I feel they just bulk out the code and make it harder to write cross-browser compliant code. I stick to text editors, and hand-write every line of code (although that's no longer true with Ruby on Rails). My favourite editor at the moment is Vi, although I have previously used JEdit and Developers Pad. As long as it has line numbers and syntax highlighting, I'm happy.