Thomas Ballard's - Personal Website

Personal Website Housekeeping. Just a quick summary of my goals for this site. (1) Maintain a semblance of permanence on the web. Hopefully you can always find me here--even after projects culminate, or connections atrophy. (2) Provide a home for my resume, samples, documentation, contributions and so on. (3) Experiment, and remind myself why I love (and hate) being a professional web developer.

Digital Resume. Using the web for my resume seems straight forward, but just to be clear, here are some advantages to keeping a resume online. A website gives you a 24/7 location where a prospective employer can access your resume. If you need a hardcopy (it's true, some folks still use these), you can print and send your resume from the electronic copy. Or, if they desire to have it emailed, you can save a tree. Providing access to your summary and samples through a simple address (.me domain), on a business card, or a thumb drive may be a great way to begin to differentiate yourself.

Samples, Documentation, Contributions. Everything said about a resume applies for your portfolio of work samples, documentation that you may generate, or collaborative contributions you make. Whether you are an artist, illustrator, poet, animator, game programmer, musician, film maker, or virtually anything else having personal web space to showcase your efforts can help you achieve your goal.

Experimenting. I love JavaScript. With years invested I still discover new wrinkles and features with every project, it's awesome! Some of these get the time and energy to create examples and learning resources to help my boys with their efforts and anyone else that can benefit. Stay tuned and watch the samples sections for these.

Links to Projects, Favorites, and Other Miscellanea

• Thomas Ballard's Resume
• Code Samples for Thomas Ballard
• Design Samples for Thomas Ballard
• Music/Sound Samples by Thomas Ballard
• Ballard Site
• My 1973 Saab 99e
• Online Jigsaw Puzzle App
• Free Puzzles Project

Building your own personal website. Today there are lots of options for building your own site, or something like it. If you are technically minded and disposed to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript then the sky is the limit. If you are gadget inclined, there are a plethora of tools and social networking sites which might tickle your fancy better by freeing you from the technical minutia of web development and instead letting you focus on the technical minutia of connecting with all your friends devices. If on the other hand you are neither and instead you just want a place to put up your basic contact info and some linguistic expression of your interests or hobbies, there are tools and providers which can "get you online" in minutes.

Some tools to consider if you are just starting out might include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, and Blogspot. These offer a smattering of corralled tool sets which can help guide you through the otherwise technically challenging process of doing what they do--namely, connecting to friends, connecting to business colleagues, connecting to your favorite bands or fans (if you are in a favorite band), and sharing your photo memories without writing the HTML yourself.

While these tools are great, there are things they don't do; things that you might want to do. In my case, I like writing games and tools, these generally take the form of HTML, CSS, JavaScript... most of which don't play nice in a tool that already uses those things to do something else. So, if you try to upload a game to one of these tools--you can't. You might take on learning Flash (or HTML5 if you don't like buying expensive software and don't mind waiting until folks with conflicting interests work out your sand box.) Personally, I think the best overall solution is to simply find a web hosting provider, purchase a domain name or two, and build and maintain your own website. And, there's nothing preventing you from doing all of the above, choosing to leverage the best aspects of all of the tools mentioned (and more), and then using your own personal website to tie everything together, and provide web space for your projects which don't fit into any of those tool providers business and marketing plans.

• You can find more info about hosting and domains here

Hangman and Free Word Puzzles Project. Lately I've been revisiting a hangman game engine I wrote long ago. It's was written using front-end JavaScript and some client-side game programming techniques. The front door for the project is here: Play Hangman Game. Here are some popular customized variations. Check a few out to see the differences. Grab the link code for your own site if you like it.

• Play JavaScript Reserved Keywords Hangman
• Play 50 US States List Hangman
• Play Resume Glossary Hangman
• Play Health Insurance Glossary Hangman
• Play Statistics Glossary Hangman
• Play Popular Tourist Vacation Destinations Hangman
• Play Bible Study Hangman
• Play Real Estate Glossary Hangman
• Favorite Artists and Eighties Bands Hangman
• US State Capitals Hangman

Examples of "front-ends" on the web, which introduce the games from different view points.

• Customizable JavaScript Hangman
• Hangman
• Favorite Artists and Bands - Eighties
• US State Capitals

MP3 Music Widget. I've been test driving Amazon's music widget. Personally I wish it played full songs rather than clips, perhaps of reduced quality so the incentive to buy a song you want to keep in your collection was still there. And, the fact that the sampling doesn't include the section of a song I particularly like means I can't use the mechanism to communicate that detail to a friend. But, the clips provide an archaic sampling of a specific song so you can refer to it in slightly less vagary than humming bars of the tune at least. Nonetheless, I love digital music because it's so much more convenient than the record store model, and with projects like the music genome taking surprising and inspiring journeys through genres can be delightful. Of late I tend to gravitate toward music that keeps the rails of computer programming superconductive and creative without requiring attention diversion.

Recent Favorite Artists and Music.

• William Orbit
• Jon Hopkins
• Ulrich Schnauss
• The Jam
• English Beat
• XTC
• Peter Gabriel
• Spoon
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• KMFDM
• Queen
• Van Halen
• The Beatles
• Pink Floyd
• The Cure
• The Police
• Yes
• Cabaret Voltaire
• The Weathermen
• Beck
• Pixies
• The Flaming Lips
• New York Dolls
• The Cult
• Missing Persons
• Type O Negative
  • Type O Negative - Dead Again

Myspace Playlists - Great for a quick programming session, stream these artists over MySpace.

Recent Favorite Books and Movies. I love reading. I prefer technical reference manuals, and non-fiction, but I also enjoy the occasional jaunt into science fiction, and occasionally fantasy novels. Movies can also be a great escape, though more often than not it seems they are just something comically overproduced or group-thunk into impotence. Here are the latest items to make my favorites.

• The Rise and Fall of Alexandria
• District 9 [Blu-ray]
• Up (4 Disc Combo Pack with Digital Copy and DVD) [Blu-ray]
• By Schism Rent Asunder - Weber, David