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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.
Photo services.
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.
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.
Examples of "front-ends" on the web, which introduce the games from different view points. Recent Favorite Artists and Music.
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.
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, 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
More Projects and Favorites
Related keywords: Thomas Ballard, Tom, Thom, javascript, web producer, web developer, Sandy Utah, Alta High School |
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