Thomas Ballard's - Personal Website

Building your own personal website. With over ten years of experience building and fiddling with websites it might seem like I would be tired of this. The truth is it's more fun each day, and while there is a lot to learn, it's an enjoyable and fulfilling pursuit.

This is helped in large part by being able to quickly sort through the crap to find sustainable web development practices. Everyone is different, and their opinions vary--but here's my list of folks and technology to try out for building or maintaining a site for yourself or a client.

Web hosts providing design help and tools.

• Bluehost.com is a popular provider. I've worked with some of these folks during my career and they are good, reasonable people, with an excellent hosting service.
• Hosting411.info can help you find hosting for a specialty niche, as well as a general purpose website. I host a few sites and applications with this provider and they've been reliable and inexpensive.
• Yola.com provides a free service. Many folks steer clear of free hosting providers, but if you don't want to spend money, this may be a good option for you.
• Lunarpages.com pitches your website online in 2 hours with free design & development help and other tools. They also offer virtual private server packages on Windows or Linux.

Photo services.

• Free Smugmug Trial for uploading photos, creating, and sharing your albums.
• Kodak Gallery offers services to convert digital photos. Check them out for coupons and special offers.
• How to share photos provides more information

Online Jigsaw Puzzles using Flash. Before the Internet, I never really like jigsaw puzzles. They were messy, required work space, and were a pain to clean up after. Then I found a cool Flash application that creates puzzles from any photo you care to feed it. Having friends who forward inspirational emails, you know, the kind with lots of pictures that consume mailbox space--I put a few of those to good use as jigsaw puzzles with the Flash app. All you need is a few minutes to kill and some basic hand-eye coordination. Check them out.

• http://www.mavenspun.com/jigsaw-puzzles/index.htm

Hangman and Free Word Puzzles Project. Lately I've been revisiting a hangman game engine I wrote long ago. It's was written using front-end JavaScript and some client-side game programming techniques. The front door for the project is here: Play Hangman Game. Here are some popular customized variations. Check a few out to see the differences. Grab the link code for your own site if you like it.

• Play JavaScript Reserved Keywords Hangman
• Play 50 US States List Hangman
• Play Resume Glossary Hangman
• Play Health Insurance Glossary Hangman
• Play Statistics Glossary Hangman
• Play Popular Tourist Vacation Destinations Hangman
• Play Bible Study Hangman
• Play Real Estate Glossary Hangman
• Favorite Artists and Eighties Bands Hangman
• US State Capitals Hangman

Examples of "front-ends" on the web, which introduce the games from different view points.

• Customizable JavaScript Hangman
• Hangman
• Favorite Artists and Bands - Eighties
• US State Capitals

MP3 Music Widget. I've been test driving Amazon's music widget. Personally I wish it played full songs rather than clips, perhaps of reduced quality so the incentive to buy a song you want to keep in your collection was still there. And, the fact that the sampling doesn't include the section of a song I particularly like means I can't use the mechanism to communicate that detail to a friend. But, the clips provide an archaic sampling of a specific song so you can refer to it in slightly less vagary than humming bars of the tune at least. Nonetheless, I love digital music because it's so much more convenient than the record store model, and with projects like the music genome taking surprising and inspiring journeys through genres can be delightful. Of late I tend to gravitate toward music that keeps the rails of computer programming superconductive and creative without requiring attention diversion.

Recent Favorite Artists and Music.

• William Orbit
• Jon Hopkins
• Ulrich Schnauss
• The Jam
• English Beat
• XTC
• Peter Gabriel
• Spoon
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• KMFDM
• Queen
• Van Halen
• The Beatles
• Pink Floyd
• The Cure
• The Police
• Yes
• Cabaret Voltaire
• The Weathermen
• Beck
• Pixies
• The Flaming Lips
• New York Dolls
• The Cult

Recent Favorite Books and Movies. I love reading. I prefer technical reference manuals, and non-fiction, but I also enjoy the occasional jaunt into science fiction, and occasionally fantasy novels. Movies can also be a great escape, though more often than not it seems they are just something comically overproduced or group-thunk into impotence. Here are the latest items to make my favorites.

• The Rise and Fall of Alexandria
• District 9 [Blu-ray]
• Up (4 Disc Combo Pack with Digital Copy and DVD) [Blu-ray]
• By Schism Rent Asunder - Weber, David

Personal Website Housekeeping. Just a quick summary of my goals for this site. (1) Maintain a semblance of permanence on the web. Hopefully you can always find me here--even after projects culminate, or connections atrophy. (2) Provide a home for my resume, samples, documentation, contributions and so on. (3) Experiment, and remind myself why I love (and hate) being a professional web developer.

Digital Resume. Using the web for my resume seems straight forward, but just to be clear, here are some advantages to keeping a resume online. A website gives you a 24/7 location where a prospective employer can access your resume. If you need a hardcopy (it's true, some folks still use these), you can print and send your resume from the electronic copy. Or, if they desire to have it emailed, you can save a tree. Providing access to your summary and samples through a simple address (.me domain), on a business card, or a thumb drive may be a great way to begin to differentiate yourself.

Samples, Documentation, Contributions. Everything said about a resume applies for your portfolio of work samples, documentation that you may generate, or collaborative contributions you make. Whether you are an artist, illustrator, poet, animator, game programmer, musician, film maker, or virtually anything else having personal web space to showcase your efforts can help you achieve your goal.

Experimenting. I love JavaScript. With years invested I still discover new wrinkles and features with every project, it's awesome! Some of these get the time and energy to create examples and learning resources to help my boys with their efforts and anyone else that can benefit. Stay tuned and watch the samples sections for these.

My Links

• Contact Information for Thomas Ballard

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• Resume for Thomas Ballard

  - Click for Resume for Thomas Ballard

• References for Thomas Ballard

  - Click for References for Thomas Ballard

• Code Samples by Thomas Ballard

  - Click for Code Samples for Thomas Ballard

• Web Design Samples by Thomas Ballard

  - Click for Design Samples for Thomas Ballard

• Music by Thomas Ballard

  - Click for Music/Sound Samples by Thomas Ballard

More Projects and Favorites

• Ballard Family Website

  - Click to Visit More Ballards

• My 1973 Saab 99e

  - Click to read about a former pet project

• Online Puzzles

  - Fun Jigsaw Puzzles, Free Puzzles Project