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Web Development

I have been puttering around with writing web pages for home and work since 1997 when I originally put up this site. I have been attracted to the prospect of web publishing since I first read about HTML. Anyone with a simple text editor and graphics program can publish an attractive document on the web. The internet is pretty much the only type of global media that isn't the exclusive domain of large corporations.

My Philosophy

Of course, very few people still use text editors for web documents but I still do; it helps encourage me to write more text and less markup. I like to make my sites easy to navigate, standards-compliant, fast to load, and easy for search engines to index. I tend to stay away from Flash and Javascript.

Beyond static web pages, the useful interactive wizardry is best performed at the server end, keeping the compatability requirements of the browser to a bare minimum.

Freedive Canada

I took over as the webmaster for the Freedive Canada web site in July of 2001. This site is the official site of the Canadian Association of Freediving & Apnea (CAFA). I was unemployed at the time so I put a lot of time into the site, refurbishing the look and expanding the content from fewer than 60 to over 200 pages.

Because this is a volunteer position, I have been free to put as much time as I see fit into the project and take the time to learn about web development and how to use the tools at my disposal.

There are some features of the site that I am particularly proud of:

  • Competition database. Perl scripts are used to generate the following pages:
    • List of competitions
    • Specific competition results
    • National and Regional rankings
    • National records
    • Competitor statistics and history
  • Database driven Pic of the Week and photo archive
  • Almost completely standards compliant to W3C recommendations.
  • The site is easy to navigate, attractive and consistent in style.
  • The site looks fine on Netscape, Mozilla, IE, Opera, Konqueror and Lynx web browsers.
  • All software used to create, host and manage the site is free and open source.

Performance Freediving

Kirk Krack of Performance Freediving liked the Freedive Canada site so much that he asked me to revamp his company's web site. I've helped to take the site through three different makeovers in my time and for a while I was in charge of all of the day-to-day updates of the site. Now, however, I keep to the more technical development aspects while Mandy takes care of the regular updates.

The main focus of my development work has been to allow Kirk and Mandy to manage their student lists and the routine correspondence even though they are on the road almost all of the time. To that end, I created a custom course registration system. It has the following features:

  • Automated course listing
  • Online registration with automated acknowledgment emails
  • Payment tracking with PayPal
  • Automated reminder emails
  • Tracking of previous courses for pre-requisites
  • Web-based administration

I have also integrated the osCommerce online store onto the site and modified it so that the store and the course system share the same customer tables.