Steve Withington
http://www.stephenwithington.com
Lead Web Developer, Ignition Studio, Inc.
As a grade-schooler growing up in Akron, Ohio during the late 1970s and early 1980's, an uncle of mine would sometimes take me to what today would be referred to as a "TRS-80 Meetup." Back then, I have no idea what they called it ... but what I do remember from those days was how cool it was to see these 'machines' and their operators showing off the things they could do with them. I remember cables strewn everywhere, cassette tape recorders, the smell of cigarettes, and guys who probably haven't had a shower in weeks. Yeah, it may not sound all that cool ... but I loved it.
Over the following years, I maintained a strong interest in computers and eventually found myself on a friend's Commodore 64 playing chess with random people all over the country using the Bulletin Board System (BBS) for communication. Before I knew it, the wonderful World Wide Web and the Internet exploded.
Oddly, I had always considered all of this just a hobby, even when I began building web sites for friends and family. In fact, my first "major" site was for a fantasy football league I was a commissioner for many moons ago. This was before Yahoo!, ESPN and others jumped on the fantasy sports bandwagon. I had purchased a software program that would compile stats each week (think floppy discs) and I would transfer this information (by hand of course) to the web site. I had created an online form for team owners to submit their lineup which was sent to me via email (hey, that was hot stuff back in the day!).
Today I'm the lead web developer at Ignition Studio, Inc., a full-service advertising agency located in Rockford, Illinois. I have experience working on a wide variety of projects ranging from small, non-profit companies to large multi-national corporations.
More recently, I've been leveraging the power of Mura CMS (a comprehensive, open-source content management system) along with my knowledge of ColdFusion, SQL, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, and so forth to shorten the development timeframe for some of the most common feature requests while allowing clients the ability to manage their own content.
I'm excited to share my knowledge of Mura with others in hopes of helping other CFML developers become acquainted with its power and flexibility.
Cheers!
