Web development & computer skills
My experience in journalism and publishing taught me the most important Web-design skill: how to communicate clearly and persuasively with an audience. To make that happen, words and images, content and presentation need to work together like right and left hands.
As a Web developer, my philosophy is simple: Figure out what you need, then figure out how to do it. Then, make it really good!
- Web sites I'm webmastering (as of 2010):
ambroselandscapes.com, a business site
- Since becoming webmaster for this site, I've completely redesigned, overhauled and expanded it with numerous photo-essay pages, a tour-de-force PHP questionnaire form, search-optimized text, photo gallery I designed, an animated banner ad I wrote and created, and much more.
oldenwilde.org, a non-profit site
- My wife and I started this site in 1996, and have continuously upgraded and expanded it ever since. Today it's extensive, popular, and highly ranked. (See, for example, this page);
oldenworks.org, an e-commerce site
- I built this online store for Coven Oldenwilde on a Magento and PayPal platform. We are using it to provide content we have created, and plan to expand it to include affiliate products.
- Web-design skills:
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Skilled with XHTML and CSS
- Example: See what I mean? Click to see a fuller example.CSS tooltips are a great way to present extra information without cluttering up a page; they are superior to "title" attributes because they can be personally styled and will pop up without delay.
- Experienced at SEO
- There seem to be as many search-engine-optimization tricks and techniques on the Web as beat-the-odds systems in Las Vegas (the difference being that SEO tricks often work!). Fundamentally, though, I've found the real key to reeling in search engines is telling the world what you're good at in ways that are both clear, and interesting. Search engines are drawn to Web sites that a) organize and present their content in Web-friendly ways, and b) are a resource people want to visit and link to.
- I've found my experience as a journalist to be invaluable in writing, editing, organizing, and styling SEO-enhanced Web copy — essentially, in lacing it artfully with keywords. As a webmaster, I have experience in researching and generating backlinks that boost SERP rankings.
- Familiar with PHP
- Example: The navigation-links menu for ambroselandscapes.com is in a "php require" file, allowing me to add a new link with just a couple of lines of code, rather than waste my client's valuable time pasting the link into a slew of separate pages. This kind of file (or the equivalent "php include") is a good way to handle information common to many pages that may need frequent manual updating, such as a page header or footer with contact info.
- Currently learning Javascript
- I prefer to avoid a Javascript solution if a simpler, sturdier method is available (for example, my dropdown menus use CSS rather than Javascript). Still, for many interactive features Javascript is the best tool to use, which is why I'm working devoutly to master it.
- Can navigate XML, SQML, most anything else for which I can look up documentation
- I like to research and learn whatever I need to know to solve a particular problem, then file written and mental notes to make it easier to solve the next problem.
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Skilled with XHTML and CSS
- These are industry-standard graphics programs for creating online and printed visual content.
Video skills: Skilled at QuickTime. Some experience with FinalCut Pro; familiar with Flash.
- See a preview of an hour-long movie I made that exploited QuickTime's layering capabilities to turn a cell-phone-quality video of a lecture into a multi-leveled instructional movie.
- See this page of MP3 recorded interviews with embedded Yahoo MediaPlayer.
- My father was a Hewlett-Packard electronics engineer, and I grew up in Cupertino, Calif., just blocks away from the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer. As a child of Silicon Valley, I've been immersed in high technology since birth. As a native Californian nature-worshipper, however, I'm as well aware of its pitfalls as its benefits.
- Since I've always been fascinated by the infinite interconnections of knowledge, I first plunged into the World Wide Web back in 1996, when it was brand new and most Web sites were just one-page lists of links on a battleship-gray background (called "Netscape gray"). I experimented with new techniques for years on the site that is now www.oldenwilde.org until 2008, by which time Web development was becoming such an obsession for me that I began to pursue it professionally.
- Earlier, as a Princeton undergrad, I worked under Prof. Arthur Mendel on the final stages of the Josquin Project, the first computer database of music. From 1987-1994, I worked for the Center for Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities under Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, creating and analyzing the MuseData database of the music of Bach, Handel, Corelli, Telemann, and more.