About Dan Webb

Dan is a 30-ish year old web developer and wannabe DJ living in West London, UK with his wife, Catherine. He’s not a geek. He’s got (at least basic) social skills but he’s into internet technology and programming languages. He’s been in the field of web development for about 7 or 8 years now after doing rather disappointingly in his Computer Science Degree due to spending a brief period persuing a career as an MC. Over the years he’s experienced and been into most web technologies but his main focus seems to have settled on client-side technologies and scripting languages. For this reason, nearly all of what you’ll read about on this site will be either DOM Scripting or Ruby On Rails related.

Most recently he’s been working as part of Vivabit creating Event Wax as well as helping out with the @media conference, blogging, writing a few articles and contributing to open source projects. You can check Dan’s code dump to see what he’s got on the boil at any one point in time. Their’s normally alot more lying around in there than is officially released so feel free to browse. He’s also recently ventured into the dangerous world of mixing work and play by attending quite a few meet ups and conferences. If you’re ever at an event that Dan is buy him a beer. His aptitude for drinking has been reviewed favourably.

Before that he spent a year travelling around the world in that cheesey backpacker way with his very cool wife getting all kinds of weird bugs and writing about the symptoms and strange experiences they had. It was a good laugh.

His other main obsession is music and particularly Hip Hop which he’s not stopped going on about since he was 8. In the past (and hopefully again in the future) he’s run a small club night with friend and Stafford Posse member Lord Chang, king of porn, called Funk 45. Most of the time though he’s happy to sit in his room of vinyl and DJ to himself. He’s into Hardcore Punk, Funk, Reggae and Drum and Bass but it’s Golden Age Hip Hop that he’ll spend hours hunting for on Ebay. Check the ‘On The Pod’ weekly charts to get an idea. In the future Dan may add a podcast of mixes to the site. Maybe.

Dan’s not currently available for work but will be able to take on new projects shortly. If you’d like a copy of his CV then get in touch at dan [at] danwebb [dot] net.

About The Site

This site’s content is mainly going to be related to web technology as that’s what he’s most known for these days but Dan might drop in the odd other thing about music or some DJ gig he’s trying to plug from time to time. Technically, it’s running on the brand new RoR blogging engine Mephisto with a load of custom plugins that Dan wrote to hook in to web API’s like last.fm and del.icio.us. All the graphics where designed by Joe McKernan, Dan’s brother and future design uber-shogun.

The front end code is all pretty simple. Dan’s resisted the temptation to JavaScript the whole thing out Wollzelle style because he believes his JavaScript Fu should be used for good not evil. He has microformatted the whole thing up though to make Drew and Tantek happy although he’s not quite sure why. It’s designed to look good in modern browsers (IE 6, your days are numbered) and to be usable otherwise.

The site is still evolving, more features will be added over the coming months so don’t be confused if things change.

Thanks and Shout Outs

Just like an album sleeve! I’d like to thank God, my moms, Shaniqua, “Overlord” Bubba X….Erm, let’s try that again.

Cheers to Joe for the help with the design of the site and Rick and Justin for helping out with the build and literally adding features to Mephisto as needed (or more often, “yeah, build it and send us a patch.”) and the lovely Catherine for putting up with the several 18 hour days required to finally get this done.