Insurmountable Oppoortunities (a blog)

I am a Front End Developer and Functional Consultant, currently working at Beaconfire where I’ve been since Januray of 2005. Before that I worked for five years at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati as their “Web Designer” (a title I’d certainly not have the gall to give myself now that I know better!), and a year after that at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Center before moving to the DC area.  I love doing this kind of work!

A very brief treatise on the subject of Front End Development.  You’re welcome!

I am a standards geek, though there are far geekier than I.  I can, but do not often choose to actually read the HTML specification, though following the online battles between those who do is endlessly entertaining.  I value accessibility very highly and am constantly trying to improve the usability of sites that I work on for people of all abilities and challenges.  That said, it’s (sadly) not always up to me.

I use the new HTML5 semantic tags whenever I can and waiting for the day that the current crop of browsers supports more of them. The form tags are particularly exciting and, along with the validation for different input types built in to the specification will be a game changer hopefully sooner than later.

You will see a good bit of CSS3 in some of these sites. I like building for the latest/greatest broswser (Chrome at the moment for me) and adding little bits of JavaScript to teach older, crummier, browsers how to behave.  This site is my test bed for more forward-thinking code.  If you understand why this snippet of currently unsupported CSS makes me giddy, you are as big a geek as I.

div.col {float: left; width: calc(25% - 1em);}

And here is a not so brief list of sites I’ve coded while working for Beaconfire.

In lieu of a very pretty resume, I simply give you this list of websites that I helped build. In all these cases I was responsible for creating the standards-compliant HTML templates from which the sites were built. If you see anything move around, fly out, slide, or otherwise react to you in any way, chances are that I did that too. I probably used jQuery to do it, but if you go back in time far enough you’ll probably run across some Scriptaculous or MooTools as well. These days, though, it’s really all about the jQuery.

Work I did prior to these is more than six years ago and mostly far too embarrassing to show.  If you have a decent sense of humor and an appreciation for how far we have come, I present you with CartTrader, a site (my first) that I built for a friend in 1997.

These sites are most likely running on SiteCore, RedDot, ezPublish, Convio, or Worpress.  I am familiar with the templating systems of all of these CMSs but have been working in ezPublish and WordPress more than the others recently.

• http://www.beaconfire.com
• http://www.globalbridges.org
• http://www.serdp.org
• http://www.aft.org
• http://www.becomeanex.org
• http://www.legacyforhealth.org
• http://www.wcs.org
• http://www.bronxzoo.com
• http://www.nyaquarium.com
• http://www.centralparkzoo.com
• http://www.prospectparkzoo.com
• http://www.queenszoo.com
• http://www.mott.org
• http://www.skillman.org
• http://www.ncoa.org
• http://www.360financialliteracy.org
• http://www.aps.org
• http://www.cal.org
• http://www.cal.org/earlylang
• http://www.cal.org/heritage
• http://www.cal.org/ehls
• http://www2.cal.org/ehls
• http://www.cal.org/co
• http://www.meta-leadershipsummit.org
• http://www.feedthepig.org
• http://www.infocomm.org
• http://www.inova.org
• http://www.lbbc.org

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this. If you are interested in working with me, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at “tim AT fiercefamily DOT com.”

Cheers,
Tim