About

My name is Ben Aldred, I am a web developer currently living in Manchester, England. I work at the BBC doing web development and a little R+D.

Me

I came into the web game relatively late. After leaving school I turned down the chance to go to Art college to embark on a journey of self discovery.
What followed was a series of crappy but character building jobs interspersed with travelling adventures in Asia and Australia. Thankfully I saw the light that was HTML 4.0 in 1999 when I created my first web page in Microsoft FrontPage. This lead to misguided dabblings with Dreamweaver until, in 2001 I went to University to learn proper programming.

The blog

This site is a place for me to post tutorials, things I have been thinking about or to share information or ideas. Hopefully people enjoy reading this blog and they can learn and get as much out of it as I do in writing it.

The blog is powered by Wordpress with a custom template built and designed by me. It uses XHTML and CSS with some Microformats thrown in. The site is hosted by Dreamhost.

Passions

There are a number of things I am very passionate about hence the change of tone in this next section. Passions are serious!

I am a strong supporter of best practices so am very passionate about using web standards in user interfaces and agile development techniques for my programming and general web development.
Using best practices makes my life as a developer easier and the work I produce better in quality.

Accessibility is important to me and making every site I produce available to all, regardless of circumstance is a key priority. If you feel this site can be improved in any way with regard to accessibility then don’t hesitate to contact me.

New Technology

I am avid observer of new technology. Learning new things really drives my passion for being a web developer. I try to take an interest in a wide range of technologies meaning I can keep up with the fast pace of the web world.

I care a lot about social software and the new ways media is being distributed by the ‘masses’. I hope one day to create an innovative social-network enabled web application which users truly value.

Watch this space…

Fun

In my space time I like to:

  • Learn photography (current status: rubbish).
  • Watch football (soccer, for all overseas readers) at the Theatre of Dreams.
  • Run
  • Eat food and drink beer.

I have a very healthy love affair with food, as my girlfriend and friends can testify. In some quarters I am known as ‘Gambas’ for my love of big fat prawns.

I along with many British people enjoy a few pints down the pub and socializing with friends. I try to practice this as often as possible at events like Geekup and NWRUG where I get to drink beer and talk/learn about technology.

To do before I die list

RECENT POSTS

PHOTOS

BITS AND PIECES

Bits of me scattered around the web.

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