I come from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the North of England, and live in Leeds, in the pretend North of England. I'm married to the lovely Katie Buffalo, she's a 'murican and the best thing since sliced bread, we met on the internet, it's the future.
I work as a web developer for Sense Internet, and have done for what seems like all of my natural life. To earn my keep I tie ribbons of php, mysql, html, css, javascript, flash and actionscript into pretty bows.
If you've looked at the archives at all you may have noticed there's a gap of 2 years unaccounted for. The entries preceeding that lull are from a site called pixelised.com that my brother and I used to run. Seemed a shame to let them go to waste.
This website plays host to 585 entries which can be broken down by type as 370 posts, 204 links, 7 quotes and 4 reviews.
Entries prior to 2003 were written by Matt and Dan Tarbit with occasional contributions from Jonathan Lumb. Attribution for older posts and comments has unfortunately become somewhat garbled by the mists of time, but I hope to make some restorative efforts in the future.
The site was built on top of the Ruby on Rails framework backed by a MySQL database. Posts are marked up in the markdown syntax and parsed by the BlueCloth gem. Some of the data for links and reviews is obtained via web service APIs. The rubilicious library is used to sync bookmarks from my del.icio.us account, and the amazon-ecs gem is used to search for and retrieve amazon product details for reviews and associate links. Emails are sent via Gmail's SMTP service with a helping hand from lib/smtp_tls.rb. The site is served by a single mongrel instance reverse-proxied behind Apache 2 & mod_proxy on a Linode VPS, shared thanks to the kindly benefaction of Ben Walton. Code is written in Textmate, vim and screen and kept under version control in a subversion respository. Icons are borrowed from the free silk icon set by Mark James.
This site belongs to Matthew J. Tarbit esquire. A tired old web developer holed-up in a hideaway somewhere in the depths of Leeds, England.
Along with being a home for my ramblings and linkings, it's also a resting place for the bones of a shared blog by the name of Pixelised, now long departed.
If you feel the need, you may add my outpourings to the deluge that is your already overflowing info drip feed.
Or why not rest a while and dig through my entries like a corpulent pig in search of all that is truffle-icious.