What's all this for?
This site is my web presence, playground and blog. It's somewhere to practice jQuery, CSS3, PHP, HTML5 and whatever else piques my interest, so apologies if things break, move about or just look ropey; I've found developing on live is a great motivator for fixing things. Another bonus of this website is it gives me an excuse to dabble in web design; this being the sixth (implemented) design, not to mention the seventh url and the ninth year of my homepage / website / slice of net-pie. Good times.
About Dan (I really need to find a better picture)
Edinburgh-born, London-based, photo-snapping, foot-stomping, music-loving, computer-game-playing, web-mongering, quiet-speaking, loud-laughing, terminally-curious, rabidly-relativistic, hyphen-abusing muppet.
I'm at a computer as often as not, though; whether designing or developing websites, tinkering with photos, playing games, trawling for trivia, firing up iplayer, fishing through itunes or chatting on messenger. Usually three or more of the above, simultaneously. I'm online a lot.
For a profession overview have a look at the CV page
Dedicated shutterbug
I've been taking point-and-shoot pictures since about 2001, documenting whatever social events I go to, as well as the odd holiday or pretty thing. I always delete most of them and tweak the rest on the computer which happily makes people think me and my tiny camera are better at this whole photography lark than we are. The ones that I like I either upload to Facebook (for the tagging and the commenting), Flickr (for the much better fidelity), or Google Plus (which is a kind of half-assed half-way house so far, but will hopefully get better).
Pics per month
In the summer of 2011 I used some EXIF scraping and the automatic sequential naming conventions of the seventeen thousand digital pictures I'd kept to work out my photo-taking since I upgraded from a film camera in late 2003, which I've charted above. As it turns out I've taken 40,000 since 2008!
Going manual
What with so much practice I'm getting progressively better at the post-processing side of things, especially after switching to Adobe Lightroom 3 to do it. You can see the results in some of my more recent favourites which can be found here on Flickr, in a set I try and update regularly.
It's been very rewarding but I'd really like to improve on the actual manual photography side of things, so to that end I got a shiny Lumix G3. Not a full SLR but pretty close, and much lighter. To be honest I'm still getting to grips with manual mode and processing RAW files, but I'm very much enjoying upping the learning curve once again!
Ye olden days
Way back in 2002 I knew next to nothing about the inner workings of the WorldWideWeb, but I was given a guest spot on a friend's blog at the same time as I found myself looking after a website for a student's union society and I quickly got into it. One thing lead to another and I gave my first personal website the slightly ridiculous name "Myncboi" (supposed to be pronounced "monkey boy") because it was an instant googlewhack! I used the site to blog and post my photos of uni events and nights out, which proved pretty popular popular with friends, acquaintances and curious randoms in those heady pre-facebook days...
After university I gave my site its third redesign and first total overhaul as part of teaching myself more about web design and development, while re-branding as the easier-to-spell "Mochaholic". Having a demo of work online lead to a couple of freelance design and development gigs through friends of friends, and from building on that I managed to land an actual bonafide career in front-end development!
Before long I decided that as a professional I should have a 'real' website, so I went back to the drawing board again with a minimalist, css-focused design and so "dangovan.com" was born. This is the second version of that site, building on the original look-and-feel, consolidating all the content pulled from all my past websites, plus various jquery bells and whistles.
These days the blog takes a back seat as Facebook and tweets have long since taken over the communication aspect; so the focus is now on links and APIs to social networking sites and drawing some of their content onto my homepage.
Contact
Being a native of the web I tweet on twitter a lot, put photos on flickr, listen to music as often as not, and have profiles on linkedin, facebook and plus.
However if you need to get me by email it's mail at dangovan dot com.
2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011,2012
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