About

Essentials

Professional

I am currently a web developer, and have been designing and developing websites since 2000. I am a graduate of the Computer Systems Technology program at Camosun College. Since starting the program, I received in-depth training in a variety of programming languages, database systems, and software development skills. For more detail on this, read my résumé. I am now a professional programmer/web developer, depending on what project I am working on currently. Since I recently graduated from the CST program at Camosun College, my IT career is just getting started.

Résumé

Digital Portfolio

Personal

In case you didn’t figure it out already, my name is Grant Palin. And this is my home on the web.

I live in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, on Canada’s west coast - right on the Pacific Ocean.

I have several hobbies, including maintaining my web presence, reading, drawing, and photography. For more on all this, you should go to the Leisure section of my site.

Colophon

Some information about this site, how it is constructed and maintained, and the technologies that made it possible.

Purpose of the Site

This site is my home on the web. I use it to publish short essays and opinion columns, display my resumé, show off my image gallery, and share my hobbies and interests.

WordPress

I used WordPress to build and control this site. Up until now, I used to have a seperate site for my resumé, one for my portfolio, and one for my blog. This meant having to deal with making updates to three seperate sites, manually creating or editing each page I added or updated, which was tedious. But now WP allows me to bring them all together into one site, that I can control completely from WP. This allows me to more easily create a common interface for the whole site, and add or update content. This applies to individual pages and blog entries. Working on my web presence is no longer a tedium, but a joy.

WP out of the box will work as a blog, but it can also be configured to act as an overall Content Management System. This took some work, but it was very worthwhile. I am able to maintain a complete site using WP, not just a blog. To find out how I managed this, go over to my blog, where I have a short series of posts on how I leveraged WP to create and maintain an entire site.

To learn more about WordPress and it’s uses, visit the WordPress Site.

Technologies

This site is built and maintained through WordPress; it utilizes the following technologies:

  • (x)HTML
  • CSS
  • PHP
  • MySQL

Plugins Used

WP on it’s own has a lot of functionality, but sometimes there is a need for that something extra. This extra functionality can be added to WP through plugins, little bits of code that are written - and then shared - by anyone who needs that bit extra, and has the knowledge to do so. To that end, I am using several plugins to fill some gaps in WP’s core functionality. Some of these may be simple enough that they could be part of a future release of WP, but for now plugins will do. I have a page listing the plugins used on this site.