I was born in the bustling metropolis almost called Batmania, but actually 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 further educated, and sent 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 Head of Design, in charge of the majority of their promotional material, and in particular their website.
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 which I completed 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 [notably their Fed Camp registration sites in 2006, 2007 and 2008] and other community organisations.
In January 2009, I began working for Digital Bridge, a small web design/development company based here in Melbourne. My official title [the one on my business card] is “Web Designer”. My time is split probably 50/50 between interface design and front-end development.
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 1999, 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’ web host.
Finally, in 2006, I organised proper hosting for my site with Lynxas, an Australian host based in Adelaide.
Originally, andrew.harrison.org was hosted by Lynxas on a Windows 2003 server running IIS. In mid-2008, I organised to move it to Lynxas’ Apache server [still running on Windows] to enable the full features of PHP and Wordpress.
After months of research into different blogging software that would work on a WAMP server, including starting to roll my own software, I decided to stick with Wordpress running a custom theme hand-built by me [using Kubrick as a base for the various Wordpress functions] along with a few tweaks here and there to make things run smoothly [and rather unconventionally from a standard Wordpress install].
There are several wordpress plugins installed, notably a rather majorly rewritten version of wp_time_since, along with PHP Markdown Extra, Content Extract, Title Case, WP-Hyphenate, Post Image [for the work section], and Link Indication.
In addition to the plugins, there is also a bit of Javascript wizardry going on, all based on the wonderful JQuery Library. Most of the JS used is based on the vanilla JQuery install, but the work image carousel uses the JQuery Cycle plugin.
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.