W(e)blinks is the personal site of Rich Adams (that rather handsome looking guy in the photo on the left). I'm currently a C++ developer in London (UK), working on airline departure control systems, but I like to build websites in my spare time.
I have a Masters degree (MEng) in Computer Systems and Software Engineering, from the University of York (UK, not Toronto). I love to travel and visit new places, I used to jump out of perfectly good planes for fun, and I have a mild interest in curry. When not sitting at a computer you can probably find me eating a curry in some strange part of the world.
Originally created back in 1999 as a Geocities site (yes, really), I eventually moved to this domain in 2002 by not very carefully typing in the name of the URL I wanted to register (I missed the "e", little did I know that missing letters would become a web 2.0 "thing"). Unfortunately I was still in school at the time, and couldn't afford to register the correct domain. By the time I'd saved my pocket money, it had been taken, so I stuck with this one.
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), but I then moved onto ASP. The ASP version allowed everything to be dynamic, which meant I also had 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. I've re-built the backend every now and then to take advantage of new techniques I've learnt. I'm looking at perhaps moving this site over to Ruby on Rails at some point, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
I use text editors to hand-craft all of the websites that I build (including this one), and don't use tools such as Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editors (What you see is what you get), as I feel I can have much more control over the content if I code it 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.
Here is a list of the RSS feeds available on this site.