Hello! Here's a little bit about me, but you might find more interesting things can be found in my blog or in my ProfHacker articles.

I am currently the INKE postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities and Information Management in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. I also have a limited appointment in the Department of English at UVic, because I can't imagine being at a university and not teaching. And to that end, I am also teaching a distance/hybrid course at my alma mater, Washington State University (in the Digital Technology and Culture program).

For the bulk of the 90s and 00s (and still am to some extent), I was the technical director for an interactive media company in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my responsibilities included enterprise web application planning and development, database design, system administration, user interface consultation, and social media/social networking strategies. I'm available for any sort of technical consultations along those lines. Additionally, for the past ten years I have written (and continue to do so) technical books; since 2004 I have written exclusively for Sams Publishing (Pearson). My latest book (published December 2009) is Sams Teach Yourself HTML & CSS in 24 Hours (8th ed.). Forthcoming titles include Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript All-in-Ine (late 2010), Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache All-in-One (5th ed.) (Spring 2011), and Sams Teach Yourself jQuery in 24 Hours (in Spring 2011, with the super awesome Jeremy Boggs).

The word "sandbox" in the name of this site comes from the hacker word. The term "sandbox," as I use it here, refers to a development environment in which projects are built and tested without running the risk of messing up a production system. Some such projects have had a home here in the sandbox before continuing on to their ultimate destinations, while others still percolate within this site. Typically these projects are password-protected but if you are curious about something just e-mail me. I have more projects in the works than I have listed here, because they are in various states of planning and implementation. You can often find information about nascent projects and ideas in my blog.

Also included in this website are syllabi and handouts from courses I have taught. There is no way to "scholar up" this statement—I just love to teach. I also love research. Heck, I just like academia. Seriously.

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