Thomas Ballard
Simi Valley, California 
www.thomas.ballard.ws
Some Back Story
At thirteen I discovered what I "wanted to be".
Finally trading in my astronaut dreams, I fell in love with computer programming...
Over the years I've focused on learning more about the "business of it".
Then in 1997 I forayed into web development, excited about the Internet as a distribution mechanism and the potential economies of scale.
Finding an opportunity in helping my brother to learn the "C" programming language, we chose to rewrite a lunar lander style game I'd developed for the Apple II back in grade school.
I had undergone informal efforts over the years to port it to the PC during Microsoft's transition from DOS to Windows...
after Apple finally succeeded in alienating me demographically by pricing me out of the market, but that's another story ;-).
The "port" (I use the term loosely) used CGA graphics (ugh, "4-colors and the truth... which is they all sucked"). I also traded-in Applesoft Basic for MS QuickBasic (another basically lateral move).
We were determined to finally "do it right" updating the graphics to use VGA (256-colors was a smorgasbord by comparison).
And, trading in the programmer-scorned BASIC language for C, which was a more popular flavor of the day as it turned out, and considerably faster as C is compiled as opposed to interpreted! (Another serious speed improvement is to use inline Assembly to do graphics calls instead of the native language constructs, BTW.)
Once the game was built, it was time to market it.
While researching, I "discovered" America Online, and volunteered as a "community leader" in an AOL software channel helping to evaluate and review member contributed software for America Online.
It was a great experience and taught me some basics about hosting and web development. Flash forward and you've got the back story that stemmed many of the examples, and spawned the evolution of my interests toward the specialized genre of programming that is web development.
Of late my focus has been trying to teach others some of the rapid development techniques I've honed over the years.
I've cautiously been leaning more toward open source, I say cautiously because at the end of shiney happy feelings and doing good in the world,
the landlord still bangs on the door for rent, and uncle sam wants his share from food, property, etc. Someday I hope to embrace
philanthropy with reckless abandon, but until then fiscal responsibility will have to suffice. And a part of fiscal responsibility
is that projects need to make sense, generate interest, and make money. If retaining rights, if only on a limited basis aids that
objective then that's how it has to be.
Finding an opportunity in helping my brother to learn the "C" programming language, we chose to rewrite a lunar lander style game I'd developed for the Apple II back in grade school. I had undergone informal efforts over the years to port it to the PC during Microsoft's transition from DOS to Windows... after Apple finally succeeded in alienating me demographically by pricing me out of the market, but that's another story ;-). The "port" (I use the term loosely) used CGA graphics (ugh, "4-colors and the truth... which is they all sucked"). I also traded-in Applesoft Basic for MS QuickBasic (another basically lateral move). We were determined to finally "do it right" updating the graphics to use VGA (256-colors was a smorgasbord by comparison). And, trading in the programmer-scorned BASIC language for C, which was a more popular flavor of the day as it turned out, and considerably faster as C is compiled as opposed to interpreted! (Another serious speed improvement is to use inline Assembly to do graphics calls instead of the native language constructs, BTW.)
Once the game was built, it was time to market it. While researching, I "discovered" America Online, and volunteered as a "community leader" in an AOL software channel helping to evaluate and review member contributed software for America Online. It was a great experience and taught me some basics about hosting and web development. Flash forward and you've got the back story that stemmed many of the examples, and spawned the evolution of my interests toward the specialized genre of programming that is web development.
Of late my focus has been trying to teach others some of the rapid development techniques I've honed over the years. I've cautiously been leaning more toward open source, I say cautiously because at the end of shiney happy feelings and doing good in the world, the landlord still bangs on the door for rent, and uncle sam wants his share from food, property, etc. Someday I hope to embrace philanthropy with reckless abandon, but until then fiscal responsibility will have to suffice. And a part of fiscal responsibility is that projects need to make sense, generate interest, and make money. If retaining rights, if only on a limited basis aids that objective then that's how it has to be.
Samples (and Projects)
Freeservers, 50Megs, Bizhosting, MySite, Community Architect (United Online Web Services)
United Online Web Services :
http://freeservers.com,
http://50megs.com,
http://bizhosting.com,
http://mysite.com,
http://communityarchitect.com,
http://globalservers.com
Working toward the decade mark, I've been involved with much of the customer facing layer and underlying support structure
of these and nearly 2000 others that fall under the category of "community architect" partners.
What you see on these pages is literally only the tip of an iceberg of systems and interactivity.
While my core competency is content generation and UI,
I've also been involved in various stages with many of the sub layers of the business as well,
for example helping bring new hires up-to-speed without breaking the system,
aiding development by finding innovative ways to overcome hurdles and the bloatocracy which somehow always seems to
find its way into business, burrowing, insulating itself, and suffocating everything else.
I'm particularly proud of the split testing mechanisms I've built and honed over the years.
From the perspective of an outside observer you would never see any manifestation revealing the testing.
However, if you were able, you would see variants in UI, pricing, recurrences, and more, all over the place.
Further, if you observed the test results, you would see which variant resulted in the best interest, conversion, or revenue based on what was being tested specifically.
When wielded by wise masters, the power of these techniques is hard to overstate.
What's more, the data is often available in near real-time, so exposure to risk can be mitigated here like it can in no other venue!
Some of these properties represent the Web's longest running web hosting brands.
Our claims to fame include subdomain addresses when others only offered subdirectory addresses, and free web hosting (before it was saturated with me-too's).
As a sibling of NetZero, Juno, and Classmates, we're United Online's representation in the shared and virtual private hosting markets.
E.S.Q. Software
http://www.esqsoft.com
This site was created as part of a software business I created in the early 1990's.
It was designed to offer games and web development information.
It's primary traffic source is search engine visitors on various topics.
This property also plays host to a centralized ad serving system based on
some community architect technology called "ISML".
Some examples of technical subject matter buried on other sections of ESQSoft.com...
(most of this material is accessible to folks searching through their own favored search engine)
- Date/Epoch Time Converter - A tool I wrote for converting epoch to dates.
- JavaScript Animation :: Fly + Parallax Scrolling - An animation technique common in side scrolling games, but on the web. (Inspired by a friend.)
- JavaScript Time Card Calculator - A tool I wrote for working through time cards.
- HTTP Help: How to test HTTP using Telnet - A write-up for testing HTTP via telnet.
- and lots more...
Some examples of technical subject matter buried on other sections of ESQSoft.com...
(most of this material is accessible to folks searching through their own favored search engine)
- Date/Epoch Time Converter - A tool I wrote for converting epoch to dates.
- JavaScript Animation :: Fly + Parallax Scrolling - An animation technique common in side scrolling games, but on the web. (Inspired by a friend.)
- JavaScript Time Card Calculator - A tool I wrote for working through time cards.
- HTTP Help: How to test HTTP using Telnet - A write-up for testing HTTP via telnet.
- and lots more...
"How To" - Dynamic HTML and JavaScript Examples
http://learning.scriptmania.com
While learning HTML, JavaScript, Flash, ActionScript, etc. for the purpose of tackling common and uncommon technical challenges,
I've tried to share my approach. I've generated some examples
and used projects to teach others similar techniques for tackling some of the common and uncommon technical
challenges that crop up during web projects. I've been working through the process of organizing a set of "How To"
resources which aggregate this information.
A design using CSS opacity and a JS library for variable backgrounds (refresh a few times to see some variations).
LinksCentral
http://linkscentral.8k.com
This site was created as a place to feature links to visitors sites. It's
been a test vehicle for combining search elements with design.
EShire.Net
http://www.eshire.net
This site was created as a vertical to offer free web space to fans of a popular set of fantasy novels.
The property was purchased by United Online in 2005.
This site features some minor flash animation.
Jefferson Place - Home Owners Association
http://jeffersonplace.8k.com/
This site was created for the Jefferson Place Home Owners Association in Sandy, Utah.
It features some exploding DIV html which uses cookies to remember a returning visitors
preferences.
CyberBREE
http://www.cyberbree.com
This site was created as a vertical to offer free web space to fans of a popular set of fantasy novels.
The property was purchased by United Online in 2005.
While I'm not a fan of frames design, this site demonstrates a frames usage case as
well as some flash animation.
Lincoln Academy
http://lincoln-academy.org/
This site was created for a charter school in American Fork, Utah.
I converted a design from James Jensen into a client side script. The primary
advantages to this approach are isolation of useless interface detail from search engines,
easy scalability, and minor performance gains from client caching. CCSTAL
AirComUSA
http://www.aircomusa.com/ ( early mocks )
This site was created for a telecommunications company in Utah.
I created the design and implemented it as a client side template.
Once the initial phase was complete, ongoing development and maintenance
was handed off to an in-house webmaster.
CompanyRank
http://www.companyrank.com
This site was the result of a collaboration by a few friends of mine.
My contribution was implementation. A challenging feature of the implementation
was a dynamic set of drop down inputs which populated children inputs based
on the parent's value. I wrote the client side script, and coordinated
with the programmer to get datasets based on the locale of the search.
Special thanks to Rob, Randy Stuart, Earl Cahill, and Erik Vorkink who
were co-conspirators on this project.
Other Samples and Miscellanea
(Expand to view the collection)
- 100 Hundreds Table Math Exercises for Grade School Kids - A JavaScript game I collaborated with my son to create one evening ...in lieu of sleeping.
- http://hangman.bappy.com - JavaScript game with modular word lists, pictures, and sounds. This was built originally in 2001 (using pre-AJAX techniques to do asyncronous late binding dynamic libraries for the words, sounds, pictures, and ads).
Play Hangman
- http://thomas.fanspace.com - CSS-P desktop-like drag and drop website prototype built in 2000. Drag and drop has since gained popularity in the wider market place. This example also uses JSCRIPT.encode (a proprietary MS relic) to obscure the drag and drop library components which were more highly valued at the time. While the page degrades to support other browser DOMs, the drag/drop functionality as implemented supports IE's DOM only (eventually I'll rewrite that, I just like the fact that it was developed when this stuff was difficult :-).
- http://www.bappy.com - Community Architect web hosting partner I created which was later bought by United Online. CA's earlier iteration supported a simply amazing level of partner skinning. It's since been simplified out by the business folks (who sometimes mistakenly throw out the baby with the bath water ;-).
- http://www.tecbox.com - A technology related Community Architect web hosting vertical.
- http://examples.bappy.com - An older version of the previous example (casually porting over examples from browser-war era coding practices...ugh)
- Aspirations - A prototype of an integrated JS slideshow component.
- http://png.bappy.com - JavaScript/PNG banner example
- JCalendar - JS ActiveX, DHTML Calendar
(semi functional example)
- Spackman - HTML, CSS, JavaScript Game pogramming example
- OrbitalTec - This was a CA partner my brother created, I created a quick flash front door for him.
- Hosting For Utah - This was a CA partner created for a specific niche based on location. It's been used to test drive some under-the-radar CA technology prior to incorporating it into UOWS code base.
- Hyper Lander - a game I wrote
(hyper_c.html)
- JavaScript Tower Scroller - Ancient JavaScript, Tower Scrolling Ad
- Slide Show CGI - Perl, CGI Programming, Project created for About.com Web Services
(CGI), (Perl Module)
- *CCSTAL: In a tribute to stupid acronyms, I've coined the JavaScript templating technique used in some of these earlier examples
as "CCSTAL". If you are curious, there's more info about CCSTAL here.
- 100 Hundreds Table Math Exercises for Grade School Kids - A JavaScript game I collaborated with my son to create one evening ...in lieu of sleeping.
- http://hangman.bappy.com - JavaScript game with modular word lists, pictures, and sounds. This was built originally in 2001 (using pre-AJAX techniques to do asyncronous late binding dynamic libraries for the words, sounds, pictures, and ads). Play Hangman
- http://thomas.fanspace.com - CSS-P desktop-like drag and drop website prototype built in 2000. Drag and drop has since gained popularity in the wider market place. This example also uses JSCRIPT.encode (a proprietary MS relic) to obscure the drag and drop library components which were more highly valued at the time. While the page degrades to support other browser DOMs, the drag/drop functionality as implemented supports IE's DOM only (eventually I'll rewrite that, I just like the fact that it was developed when this stuff was difficult :-).
- http://www.bappy.com - Community Architect web hosting partner I created which was later bought by United Online. CA's earlier iteration supported a simply amazing level of partner skinning. It's since been simplified out by the business folks (who sometimes mistakenly throw out the baby with the bath water ;-).
- http://www.tecbox.com - A technology related Community Architect web hosting vertical.
- http://examples.bappy.com - An older version of the previous example (casually porting over examples from browser-war era coding practices...ugh)
- Aspirations - A prototype of an integrated JS slideshow component.
- http://png.bappy.com - JavaScript/PNG banner example
- JCalendar - JS ActiveX, DHTML Calendar (semi functional example)
- Spackman - HTML, CSS, JavaScript Game pogramming example
- OrbitalTec - This was a CA partner my brother created, I created a quick flash front door for him.
- Hosting For Utah - This was a CA partner created for a specific niche based on location. It's been used to test drive some under-the-radar CA technology prior to incorporating it into UOWS code base.
- Hyper Lander - a game I wrote (hyper_c.html)
- JavaScript Tower Scroller - Ancient JavaScript, Tower Scrolling Ad
- Slide Show CGI - Perl, CGI Programming, Project created for About.com Web Services (CGI), (Perl Module)
- *CCSTAL: In a tribute to stupid acronyms, I've coined the JavaScript templating technique used in some of these earlier examples as "CCSTAL". If you are curious, there's more info about CCSTAL here.