When I was 8 years old my father bought a TRS-80 Model I Level I computer from Radio Shack. It had 4k of RAM and used a cassette deck to load programs. After a happy accident, it ended up in my hands and I learned to write my own programs. When I entered college, I was certain that I wanted to be a computer programmer for the rest of my life and so far, it’s been a dream come true.
In college, I learned BASIC, Pascal, ADA and several other obscure languages. After graduation, I went to work for Symantec and over several years I bounced around to Ashton-Tate, Software Publishing Corporation (SPC), Hewlett-Packard, and Apple. Eventually landing at PowerBASIC where I worked for nearly 10 years. When I left PowerBASIC, it was to start a business with my then wife building web sites for clients. I was the developer and she was the designer. I primarily coded using Active Server Pages (ASP) in those days. And every site was coded by hand, individually, in those days. As business grew, we had to find some kind of Content Management System to help us create sites faster and we settled on the most popular one of the day, Movable Type. After several years of frustration in customizing sites to work with MLS data (for real estate web sites), I found WordPress while watching TechTV. I downloaded it, installed it, and have been working with it ever since.
The best thing I ever learned in college was the ability to quickly learn ANY programming language. I’ve coded in BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java and bunches of other languages. So learning PHP to create plugins and extensions for WordPress was pretty easy.
I LOVE WORDPRESS!
The incredible amount of themes and plugins make WordPress extremely flexible. You can create ANY type of web site… A blog, a shop, a gallery, literally anything. And as a developer (code-monkey) WordPress is so easy to extend to make it do anything you want it to do. My biggest project to date is the WIBW News Now web site which is highly customized. Nearly every part of the web site is a widget or shortcode.
This site is a place to showcase all that I do, but these days I mostly spend my time coding for my employer and clients. Along the way I’ll post some code and do reviews of the various tools (plugins and themes) that I have tried along the way.
And now that I’m spending more time speaking at WordCamps, I’ll explore the various topics of my speaking engagements and materials associated with them.
