Web portfolio

My web portfolio started in high school, ever since I've always been interested in web development, cross-browser compatibility and portable web applications. At early stages I was doing the easy job - converting images into web templates. Then I learned some basics about web design and graphics manipulation programs (Photoshop vs GIMP) and was able to create some templates of my own.

The fun part started after learning web programming. JavaScript was a nice start, but it didn't provide any server side interaction, that's when I found out about Perl. To be honest, the syntax was a bit confusing, so were all the books that I came across, so I switched to PHP vs MySQL... Now, in the light of all the uncertainty of MySQL's future, I'm thinking of switching to PostgreSQL :S

Recent projects

	Giftah.com was started as a university project by 3 students (including me) at the University of Waterloo in January 2009 and has since received an enormous amount of positive feedback and won the top prize at the VeloCity symposium on March 31, 2009. The site features custom plugin based framework and is fully "AJAX'ified", with behaviour similar to that of Gmail, Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 applications.
	FindMeSignMe.com is a project that I started working on as a freelancer and ended up as a partner. Unlike most of the other jobs, this one is a "complete package" that was built in several stages from ground up. Some of the website's components had to be completed with the help of my friends due to the lack of time.
	ivandulava.com is my friend's (Ivan Dulava) home page. It's relatively simple, but I did write some custom JavaScript and PHP scripts for it. You can read about the implementation in the "Notes" section. Make sure you check out this web site and listen to the music samples that Ivan has created. If you like trance/techno type of music, you'll definitely like his music too.

Templates

These are a number of screen shots of the templates I created. Some of the templates have been slightly redesigned by others (graphics work), but most of them are original. I'm not sure where they might be used today, because they were created for a reseller company. However, I keep the right to sell the copies of some of them (those that are "available") - that's the reason why the HTML/CSS source code is not posted publically :)

Also, please don't mind the fact that the majority of them are not in English. It's the design that's important, text can always be changed...

	Topic: "Absinthe" Language: English, Russian Availability: No
	Topic: "Paintball" Language: English, Russian Availability: No
	Topic: "No Smoking!" Language: English, Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Musical Instruments" Language: Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Hunting" Language: Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Truth about Drugs" Language: English, Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Cats" Language: English, Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Consumer Rights" Language: Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Nursing" Language: Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Tourist Equipment" Language: Russian Availability: No
	Topic: "Autonavigation" Language: Russian Availability: No
	Topic: "HIV/AIDS" Language: English, Russian Availability: Yes
	Topic: "Archeology" Language: Russian Availability: No