aboutme

I was born on July 30th 1984 in the bustling metropolis almost called Batmania, but disappointingly called Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived in Melbourne my whole life.

Though I was able to read from a young age, my parents still saw it fit to ensure that my young mind be educated, and made the appropriate arrangements to send me to Mount Scopus College. I attended Scopus for my entire schooling career, from kinder all the way through to year 12. I graduated in 2002.

During 2003 I spent a year in Israel on Habonim Dror’s Shnat program. I had been a member of Habo since grade 6, and was involved with the movement through 2006, when I was their Federal Treasurer. I also served as their Creative Director, in charge of the majority of their promotional material.

Upon returning to Australia, I commenced studying a double degree in Engineering and Industrial Design at Monash University. At the beginning of 2006 I switched to the single Industrial Design degree, and I’m set to graduate at the end of 2008.

After a few small design and tutoring jobs throughout 2004, I started doing freelance website and graphic design in late 2004. I started taking small contracts for family and friends who usually owned small businesses, and have slowly but surely taken larger contracts for more complicated sites. I’ve also done pro-bono work for Habo [namely their Fed Camp registration sites in 2006, 2007 and 2008] and other community organisations.

aboutandrew.harrison.org

The harrison.org domain is owned by Trevor Harrison [no relation] who operates it as a web and mail server for members of what he calls “The Harrison Family Organisation” and what others would call “anyone with the surname Harrison”.

I’ve been using the email address andrew@harrison.org since some time late last century or early this century, and I’ve been using the andrew.harrison.org subdomain in some form since late 2002 or so. Prior to acquiring the subdomain, I used various domains from free domain/hosting providers [the only one I can remember is idesign.iwarp.com but there were a couple]

Initially, the subdomain served as a redirect to the 10MB of hosting space provided by my ISP. Eventually, once I discovered I could set up the subdomain to forward http requests to another domain rather than redirect there [and thus use the andrew.harrison.org/page.html structure] I redesigned the site, still with that pitiful 10MB of space. For some of the larger files I outsourced the hosting to my parents’ host.

Finally, in 2006, I organised proper hosting for my site with Lynxas, an Australian host based in Adelaide.

andrew.harrison.org is hosted by Lynxas on a Windows 2003 server running IIS. The site is powered by Wordpress 2.5 running a custom theme as well as quite a few tweaks here and there to make things run smoothly.

There are several wordpress plugins installed, notably a rather majorly rewritten version of wp_time_since, PHP Markdown Extra and Link Indication. Further information about sources for some of the coding techniques used on the site can be found in the source, usually where the technique is used. If you believe that I've used code of yours and haven't attributed it, please let me know.

Because of the lack of mod_rewrite capabilities due to the server running IIS, I’ve utilised Einar Egilsson’s Pretty Wordpress Permalinks hack to get everything to have pretty URLs. Due to the limitations of this method, some of the pages, including this one, are hard coded.

If you are so inclined, you should be able to run the entire site through W3C’s (X)HTML Validator and have it return as valid code. If you do go to the trouble of validating it, and it returns even a single error, please let me know.

Likewise, the site is designed to work on all modern, standards-compliant browsers, and render consistently in those browsers. If you are using a browser that renders this site strangely, please inform me and I will update the site accordingly.