About me

Ahem. Hello! I’m Rik and welcome to rikrikrik, my personal site. Want to know more about me? Nope? Okay. Well, read if you change your mind.

1. I currently live in a very small flat in Islington, North London
2. I was born in Bury, north Manchester, but mainly I was brought up in the “quite lovely” (heavy sarcasm) Ashton-under-Lyne, east Manchester. Hence the bad hair and bad taste in music.
3. I live with Nat, who’s very sexy (I have to say that or she’ll batter me) and have been going out with for aaaages (like over 4 years). She is a weird combo of Essex girl and north Wales girl…
4. I went to uni in Durham. Van Mildert College to be exact. I even won honorary life membership there because everyone thought I was great, or something.
5. I did a maths degree, for what reason I don’t know. I’ve never used any of the knowledge I gained during my degree.
6. Talking about uni, you can Facebook me. I don’t know what this does. Sounds a bit rude.
7. I am an indie/rock music fan, you can even see my last.fm profile for the ““white noise”“ bands that I listen to. \m/
8. That said, I do have a lot of guilty musical pleasures. These include Girls Aloud, McFly, Busted, Village People and Erasure. And that’s only the start of the list too. I apologise to anyone to who overhears my listening habits.
9. I enjoy emails. Send me one! rik at this domain dot com
10. I have a coke habit which I’m trying to cut down. Coca-cola, that is.
11. I work generally as a front end developer, which means I do XHTML, CSS and Javascript.
12. But I do dabble in PHP, Rails, Apache and whatever else I’m needed for. You can find more techy knowledge about me here
13. I also write things for the lovely people at .net magazine. These things get published in magazines, which is nice.
14. Considering I only got a B at GCSE for English, I’m still a bit surprised .net allow me to submit anything at all.
15. I also make some nice plug-ins for the jQuery Javascript library. Yes, I am geeky. I know that already.
16. I currently work for Mook Framfab Start Creative eMomentum in the rather lovely Farringdon.
17. I’m one of the main developers of welovelocal.com

Just a mini-disclaimer: none of the opinions expressed on this site reflect anyone else views or any company I have, do, or will work for. In fact, they would probably disagree..

Colophon

Colophon is such a strange word, isn’t it? If you don’t know what a colophon is, the dictionary definition is “a publisher’s emblem or imprint, esp. one on the title page or spine of a book”. More recently, web designers have been using it to describe how they have built their site.

Colours on this site include:

• #333333 for dark grey background and top text colour
• #ffffff for white background and white text (obviously)
• #394d3e for green background
• #008323 for green on white link colour
• #5fc479 for green on green link colour

The font on this site is Arial, and the font for the logo is Gill Sans. The angles are 5 degrees for the logos and 2 degrees for the background. Somehow the logo at 2 degrees looked weird and not as slanted, some kind of optical illusion.

The back end of the site is using Textpattern and the front end was built with web standards™ using Textmate. The site is hosted on Textdrive. That’s three text-‘s. Texttexttext.

The site is called rikrikrik due to a discussion with James Sui about the new site for popular rock combo Brakes. I thought he should get jamesjamesjames in competition, and he suggested rikrikrik back, which I thought sounded quite cool.