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 preceding 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 629 entries which can be broken down by type as 371 posts, 245 links, 9 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 is built using the Ruby on Rails framework backed by a MySQL database. Posts are marked up in the markdown syntax and parsed by the BlueCloth gem. Code is highlighted with Pygments. Some of the data for links and reviews is obtained via web service APIs. The rubilicious library is used to sync bookmarks from a 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 Apache 2 & mod_rails 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.