About

Welcome to my blog.  I’ve been working in web and business development since 1995.  I was fortunate enough to get into this industry before the explosion of the Internet into every aspect of every person’s life.  When I started programming web pages, I used Mosaic then later Netscape 1.0.  I can recall debating with my colleagues whether or not to use html tables when building web pages.  Those debates now seem comical when you consider what web browsers can do today.  When Internet Explorer 3.0 arrived on the scene, the use of html tables became commonplace.

While designing web sites in 95 and 96, there were a few things designers watched out for.  For one, pages had to be kept small.  We tried to not design any page where the page and graphics amounted to more than 100k.  After all, most people had a 33.6k modem, and only some had the privilege of running a 56k modem.

Next step, you had to be sure to restrain the colors of your GIF images to the web safe palette.  Anyone coming into this industry after 2000 is saying “The web safe what?”  That’s right, the Internet gods (Actually is was a lady named Lynda Weinman) determined that there were 216 colors that were could be displayed on Macs and PCs without dithering.  Using those colors, you could be sure that your graphics would look smooth (i.e. no dithering where you don’t want it).  That’s because most computers could only display 256 colors on screen, paltry by today’s standards.  Oh, and PhotoShop 3 didn’t have Export for Web, so you had to download a color reducing utility off of a Usenet site or an FTP site.

Next, let’s consider screen resolution.  640×480 was what most people were running.  If you had a 15″ display, you were doing great.  If you had a 17″ display you were living large.  And a 21″ screen could only be found in high-end design studios and universities.  So your usable screen real estate was about 600 pixels wide.  That covers the majority of users and their 15″ monitors.

Obviously, web design is totally different than when I started over a decade ago.  And lucky for me, I’m not building sites the same way I did back then (Although, maybe I’ll try that as an experiment and blog it some time).

Since then, I’ve done web development using CGI (Wrote my own CGI gateway using RealBasic), Perl, Java, WebObjects, ASP/VBScript and .Net.  I started programming with PHP in about 2001, just after adopting Mac OS X as my operating system of choice.

Now I’m involved in WordPress and Drupal development.  My development is done on MVC frameworks using PHP and MySQL.  For e-commerce, I look to Magento for it’s expandability and robustness. And that’s what you’re looking at now.  This site is meant to store my snippets of code, my ideas and my work.  It’s a way for me to share my experiences with others who are interested.