W(e)blinks is the personal site of Rich Adams (that rather handsome looking guy in the photo above). I'm a British programmer living in San Francisco. By day I work with servers at Gravity Mobile as a Mobile Software Systems Engineer, by night I write code and fight crime. But I like to build websites in my spare time.
W(e)blinks
Originally created back in 1999 as a Geocities site (yes, really), I eventually moved to this domain in 2002. It began as a place to collect all of my favourite links (hence the name), so that my friends could see the websites I'd been reading. Originally just a few static HTML pages (with copius amounts of horrible JavaScript), I then moved on to ASP. The ASP version allowed everything to be dynamic for the first time, so I used a MS Access database for all of the links, and had a simple voting system where people could vote up the links they like (think Digg, but not as good).
Eventually my interest in ASP died, and I picked up a project that involved learning PHP. After using PHP on other projects, I eventually rebuilt this site to use PHP and MySQL for the database, a much more common approach. The focus then moved away from links, and on just being my personal blog. I refactor and re-architect the backend code every now and then to take advantage of whatever I've learnt since the last time I refactored or re-architected it.
The site was coded entirely in a text editor (as are all the sites I build). I stay well away from tools like Dreamweaver as I feel I can have much more control (and learn more) if I write the code myself.
Colophon
The following things were used to build this site.
Some more info about the site :
- All of the photos in the banner image were taken by me while on my travels.
- This site uses Mint for statistics.
- Hosted with Dreamhost.
- Makes use of the Sweetie free icon set by Joseph North and the Silk free icon set by Mark James.
- Written to W3C XHTML and CSS standards.
- I use Google Code Prettify for the syntax highlighting of code samples in notes.
Here is a list of the RSS feeds available on this site.