Neil Merton

About

I’m a web designer and developer. I’ve worked full time as a web professional since 1998 after being introduced to the internet by a friend in 1996. Before that I built cable harnesses for Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and have also worked as an Explosion Prevension Officer at the South African Bureau of Standards!

What do I do between the hours of 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday? I’m employed as a Senior ColdFusion Developer at Servelogic. I started working there in January 2007. Previously I was employed by the Sytner Group as their Senior Web Designer.

Library

Pretty much all I know about web design and development comes from either spending many hours on the internet searching for things like CSS, XHTML, Javascript, DOM, Flash, Actionscript, ColdFusion or SQL Server or from reading books. These include:

Designing With Web Standards
HTML Utopia: designing Without Tables Using CSS 2nd Ed
DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using Javascript & DOM
ColdFusion MX Bible
Macromedia Advanced ColdFusion MX Application Development
Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7 Certified Developer Study Guide

I can highly recommend any of these books, especially ‘Designing With Web Standards’. If you are still creating websites using tables then read this book today. It will change the way you approach website design.

Awards and recognition

• ColdFusion Guru of the Year 2005 Nominee - SitePoint
• Most Improve Member of the Year 2005 Nominee - SitePoint
• CSS Bloom

About the website

This website is powered by Wordpress - an open source web blogging application written in PHP with database functionality provided by MySQL. Along with Wordpress this website utilises a few plugins that help to customise the output. These include:

• Akismet - checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not
• Audio Player - embed MP3s into posts and pages
• Author Highlight - enabling you to see my comments easily
• Comment Timeout - automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time
• Gravatar - include globally recognized avatars in your comments
• Gravatar - include globally recognized avatars in your comments
• Maintenance Mode - adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance
• Preserve Code Formatting - allows HTML code, etc to be displayed
• Scrobbler - displays Last.fm webservice information for a user
• Subscribe To Comments - allows visitors to receive emails when new comments are added to a post
• Twitter Tools - bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter
• WP-ContactForm - produces a standard contact form for a Wordpress page or post

Domain and hosting is provided by Easyspace.