Thomas Ballard

Thomas Ballard is a web developer most recently from Utah, USA.
He has worked for Northsky, an Orem, Utah based web hosting company that created and operated Freeservers.com and Community Architect.

More recently, he's worked with About.com and was a part of the effort to make About.com a top 10 Internet property in terms of traffic. A part of that traffic came from the web hosting properties acquired by About.com and operated as About Web Services. In 2004 About Web Services was acquired by United Online. Thomas currently works as a senior web producer for Netzero in addition to providing occasional support for recently transitioned web hosting properties, MySite.com, Freeservers.com, CommunityArchitect.com, and others.

In addition to web development work, Thomas has studied computer programming for many years proclaiming it "his first love" (the requisite proclamation all nerds make as they proudly emerge from the closet of social ineptitude). A passion for writing games, client-side applications, and web programming projects centered on UI/UX are inevitable features of any conversation he takes a part in these days (whether or not that was the intended topic for discussion).

He's always been an avid self-learner--many new technologies are not taught by traditional educational outlets. In additional to a love for learning, he enjoys teaching others--having inherited a core belief in the importance of education. Many of his programming projects orient around questions raised by others about how to accomplish a certain programming task.

In addition to his technical work, Thomas has created and produced software including games, client-side programs, and web applications. Among them, the game Hyper Lander. Hyper Lander originated in the 80's as an Apple II program designed to help expose programming students to game programming concepts. The industry has come along way since those days, but the enjoyment of producing useful applications to solve problems or provide entertainment continue to be a passion of Thomas'.

Thomas created CCSTAL partially as a simplified client-side alternative to technologies such as SiteMesh. For web projects in which the access to server side elements is limited or non-existent, CCSTAL provides a means of templating that is more dynamic than you might find in proprietary software such as Dreamweaver (which provides a means of merging together library files prior to "publishing" them to the server), yet less "access-intensive" than Template Toolkit, SiteMesh, or other server side templating systems. ("Access intensive" is a tongue-in-cheek characterization regarding an occasionally observed difficulty to get some programmers or systems administration resources to "play nice" with others. While the brilliance of these folks can't be denied, the social interface is sometimes considerably difficult to operate--it seems like bringing maintenance programmers or developers into a project that is somebody's "baby" can be unnecessarily painful particularly when "access" is a requirement.) See more about CCSTAL here.

Current projects include,
* Additional web game development using HTML and JavaScript
* Further exploration of CCSTAL objectives
* WAP assessments for integrating more wireless features into hosting offerings
* Exploring better integration of Podcasting support in hosting offerings

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