I’m finishing up an Associates of Applied Science degree in Web Design in a few weeks, and I’m working on my “big project” for this semester…conversion of SurvivalRing.org to a database driven website, from static html pages. It’s going to be a biggie, but I’m at the point of total understanding of how and what to do.

Very happy to be at this point, too. This is the reason I came back to college as a non-traditional student…to learn the skills to enhance a project that has taken over my life, and make it the cutting edge resource that I know it can be.

At the same time I’ve been working on this degree, and the A.A.S in Electronic Media that I earned last year, I’ve also been playing with a lot of other web technology.

Using Dreamweaver and Flash, I’ve done some pretty cool things, and I’m very comfortable with what these tools can do. I’ve come to enjoy a handful of tools that make web development much faster and easier. For example, I have a full blown web server running on my laptop right now, using Wampserver. This package is free, includes mysql, php, apache, and phpmyadmin. Perl, Zend Optimizer, and Webalizer are also available as downloads for this wonderful tool. I’m using this system to work on many projects right now, before taking them to my online hosting account. Development time has been greatly increased.

I’ve also been hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails, and found a similar package for creating an environment on the laptop for learning Ruby. It’s called Instant Rails, and creates a running server environment for Ruby. I haven’t done anything with Ruby yet, but it looks like an immensely likable package. Once I’ve played with it a bit, I’ll share some fun stuff I do with it.

I’m sure I’ve stated it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m not getting these degrees and skills to just be hireable by other companies. I’m putting enormous amounts of time into creating cutting edge web tools, infrastructure, and state of the art programming, to enable much easier, greatly enhanced, and much faster serving of the same science and fact based survival and preparedness information I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.

Sure, I’ll love a good paying, benefit enhanced, and long term job to make my life easier, supporting my wife and I, in some comfort and ease (compared to the path we’ve had for the past 20 years of hard work due to no college degrees).

The Entreprenuerial bug has bitten, and I’ve got a business plan, along with marketing and publicity plans, to make my little SurvivalRing website THE survival and preparedness site for the ages…or at least enough to help folks worldwide, while making a real living from it. Time will tell…but I know enough now that I can make it happen.

Time to head back to the editing screen to do some more code hacking…Enjoy the sites!