Welcome to FixTheCode.ca  :)

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Greetings & welcome to FixTheCode.ca, my name is David Crawford and I've been "fixing the code" for coming up on 15 years now. My humble beginnings started as a teenager who made websites out of his parent's basement as a means to earn more revenue than I could working at a "McJob". By the end of high school I was delivering contract-based custom CGI scripts and websites for small to medium-sized businesses. In University I ran the technical and operations side of a small shared UNIX web hosting company (ThinkHost) out of my dorm room! Specializing in the area of UNIX/Linux web hosting and hosted applications, I suspect that by now you are starting to appreciate exactly how I evolved into the web savvy "dot-com guru" that I am today.

Some people have a gift for making things look aesthetically pleasing, but I have always been more interested in the ergonomic side of things - or more specifically how to make computer processes work faster and more efficiently. When I was young I was definitely one of those kids who took apart his toys, just so I could see how they worked! It is for this reason that the focus of my efforts have generally revolved around the backend of websites, making all the magic happen behind those pretty looking web pages! I really enjoy solving very big data set & very large environment problems - the largest of which that I have had the privilege of working on to date was the Network Solutions shared Linux web hosting environment (for nearly four years). One of my favourite aspects of working in Information Technology is just how quickly everything is changing and evolving, with doubling times for processing speeds and data set growth falling at an increasingly rapid rate - there is never a dull moment!

I put together this website because every good web-oriented IT professional should have a slick looking presence on the web. In my opinion it is simply not enough in today's age to merely claim that you can do something, but you must demonstrate it as well. This website not only accomplishes that, but also provides me with a platform where I can play around with website and coding ideas in my spare time, and perhaps rant just a little bit about the everyday annoyances of working in the field of IT in the hopes that I can stimulate some thought among my peers about how we can better approach these problems in the future.

Twitter Integration (Website Features)

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You may notice that the light blue bar (herein referred to as the "Tweet Bar") located directly underneath the banner logo of this website is scrolling from side to side revealing messages of no more than 140 characters in length! Yes, these are in fact my own tweets - fetched from the Twitter API using the JSON interface and PHP5 so that they can be included as part of my website content (I have elected to make the code used for doing so freely available for download under the "Code" section of this website).

Hovering over a tweet will cause the scrolling slideshow to pause so that you can click on links, while moving the mouse out again will restart the scrolling motion. Hovering over the sides of the scrolling slideshow will speed up the scrolling animation to the left and right respectively. Clicking on any of the dark grey "Twitter Icons" located in-between some tweets will activate a HighSlide pop-up that contains a quick overview of my Twitter account information, including my live tweet and follower counts. URLs in my tweets are also converted into click-able hyperlinks; which includes not only http & ftp URLs, but also turns mentions into a link to that person's Twitter profile and hash-tags into a link to the Twitter live search results page using the hash-tag as the query. Last but not least, my favourite feature is tweets with location information from a GPS will contain a link with the location name, that when clicked will activate another HighSlide pop-up containing a Google Map of the exact GPS coordinates of that particular tweet!

Feel free to give it a try, or include the code as part of your own website!