Calling Card

I’m long time educational technologist, for some years independently self-employed, calling myself an “itinerant web geek”, providing anything from development of custom web sites, often but not limited to WordPress, but also supporting planning for training and development in working, teaching, creating online. I work and teach online. Since June 2021 I have taken up a full time perch in community engagement for Open Education Global.

I create a lot of free resources, like WordPress themes, plugins, and other funky web tools, available on GitHub pile (see the “web work” tab), and I have put more than 70,000 of my own flickr photos into the public domain.

I do many projects on my own time and motivation and while hardly done at a professional level they aom to be well documented/commented and made fully available to anyone wishing to venture in. If anything I do provides some value to you please show some support love via patreon or a one time via paypal. Or just any message of thanks is appreciated too, they are as good as gold.

     

Currently I live and work from a quiet rural location outside of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan where I am happily married to the teacher/adventurer Cori Saas. She, like I, loves chasing light and nature with our cameras.

For more of a portfolio, see my own hand made site featuring more about my work and ideas, made by me via old fashioned web making, with fingers in the code, from the Treble bootstrap theme.

What I Do

Folio

For more about what I have do or done, see my portfolio site at http://cogdog.info.

It includes work experience, publications, presentations, and browsable interface of selected work for various clients, plus a second folio of my personal projects.

This site is all hand crafted in HTML, just in case you might think from the other work All He Does is WordPress.

I do more than just make web sites, what I love the most, and excel in, is working with individuals and groups to find new approaches for building what they imagine. Often the starting place is a visual metaphor (like the UDG Agora project).

Anyone can roll out stuff from templates, I have the demonstrable ability to go beyond what is possible in most tools, spaces. I can find ways to bend technology to meet your whims, not the other way around.

The other thing about the way I work is a focus on explaining things in understandable language. And most everything I have done is described, shared, peeled apart at CogDogBlog.

My early highlights includes the Writing HTML Tutorial and the Feed2JS service (still in operation). I have a long record of developing and designing in WordPress including building systems for content syndication and a series of SPLOT tools built as stand alone WordPress themes.

An interest in web-based storytelling combined with tapping into the flickr API led to development of two tool sites- Five Card Flickr Stories and Pechaflickr

Giving attribution is a long running theme in the blog and maybe my all time favorite contribution is the flickr cc attribution helper.

If anything is a symbol of how I work it is this very site, which uses a a WordPress Theme I built and make freely available as a WordPress theme. As typical, I blogged the story behind it.

I have more “Calling Card” style WordPress themes available. These, and several SPLOTs, are available too as single click full cpanel installs, with all plugins and demo content, from the cool people at Reclaim Hosting.

Much of my work is in building and help other use custom modified WordPress themes, as well as more recently work building sites that leverage the WordPress (and other) web APIs. See a good sample of my work in my portfolio as well as my GitHub site.

Open The Folio

A Cog, A Dog, a Blog

CogDogBlog has been home, my domain of my own, on the web since April 2013. It’s my space for thinking out loud, sharing my ideas, and codes, and other bits of life.

Blogging has been and still is one of most important ways I spend my time- not for getting an audience, but mainly for a place to hang my thoughts.

Read CogDogBlog

Photography

Photography is my favorite creative thing to do. Since 2004 I have shared over 60,000 photos on flickr, all released under open licenses. Many of my photos have been reused by other many times leading to amazing stories or just wonderous acts of web serendipity.

For the latest

Explore my photos in flickr

or you can also float down my flickr river.

Since 2008 I have done a daily photo project, each posted to an album in flickr, which is added to a grand collection. It’s not about being a perfect 365 for 365 but just doing what I can to practice seeing the world through a lens.

Counter to most common wisdom, I just give ’em away for free, since 2016 I chose to make all my photos available as public domain (Creative Commons CC0 license) because making money has never from my photos has never been a goal, and any reuse of my photos is a reward of its own (sometimes my advice is best taken with castor oil). I have found that be using the most frictionless terms, many people go above and beyond the minimum rules of licenses, and glorious things have happened.

I also put some stuff as well in Instagram but that’s pretty much tossed away, consider the way they downgrade photo quality. And I am wary of who owns the outfit.

I have created new WordPress Theme, WP-Lens, that could make a good photo portfolio for someone interested in something, well, simple and different.

And finally, I keep my own WordPress-powered gallery of my favorite, favorite photos, housed at a place I call Barking Dog Studios.

Barking Dog Studios

Show Time! Presentations

Yikes, here I go with the obligatory TEDx photo. Well, giving one in San Juan, Puerto Rico about my most memorable teachers was… memorable. Call me a cliché.

I’ve had the fortune to give a number of keynotes and conference presentations, workshops, in person, online, in many parts of the world.

In the dog-fooding department, where in 2008 I blogged about the presentation not being the same as the presentation slides, I keep a “Best in Show” collection of not only the decks, but archived recordings (many times my own audio recording) and a web page for most that include all web sites mentioned.

See and hear me in action in a YouTube playlist selection of talks and interviews

I have also created a SPLOT that turns WordPress into something much more useful than Powerpoint, see the SPLOTpoint theme and see several in action at http://show.cogdog.casa/.

Best in Show Presentations