About Me
Who is David Hurst?
I’m 28, married with a young son and I live in the South West of England. I currently own 50% of Higher Sites, a web development company I started with Tom Wittlin (please note that Tom’s site often contains strong language) in June 2005, and I spend my days developing content managed websites using the PHP programming language and MySQL databases.
What is the purpose of this site?
It’s really my outlet for anything I want to talk about. I try to regularly include helpful technical guides and programming how-tos, but I do sometimes get sidetracked and stand on my soap box. In any case, I hope you find something of interest. The site has had over 22,000 unique visitors and more than 146,000 hits in the past year, so I’m guessing some of you at least enjoy what you read.
More about me:
My interest in programming first started at age 12, where I began creating simple programs in BBC BASIC for my Acorn Electron (a mighty beast with a whole 32KB of RAM !!). Over the past nine years I have been perfecting my programming skills in a commercial environment, and have enjoyed working for some prestigious clients, including Castrol Oils, Amoco, BiWater International, Johnson & Johnson, Vodafone, Coca-Cola and the British Museum. Whilst I still do work on large scale projects for corporate clients, I believe that I can apply the experience gained to much smaller businesses also.
My other consuming interest is playing and recording music. In my limited spare time I am the sound engineer for Somerset based bluegrass and folk band Southern County.
I take my computing seriously, and have a full network environment at home for web development and music production:
- Apple MacBook Pro 17″ Core Duo 2.16GHz with 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HD, 8x Superdrive and ATI x1600 256MB Graphics - running Windows XP and Ubuntu with Parallels Desktop;
- Apple PowerMac G4 1.0GHz with 1.5Gb RAM, 220Gb HD and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB Graphics;
- Apple Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz with 512MB RAM, 80Gb HD, SuperDrive and ATi Radeon 9200 64MB Graphics used as a general email and web machine - FOR SALE: £300 - call me on 07968 153544 for more info;
- Phonic 24 channel professional mixer;
- 2 x Behringer Mini FEX800 digital FX units;
- Phonic PCL3200 rack-mounted dual channel compressor and gate;
- t.bone SC450 large diaphragm condenser microphone with shock mount for vocals and instruments;
- PODII guitar effects processor and virtual amplifier, and;
- Logic Express 7.2 for music production.
I prefer Mac OS X to Windows as a development platform given its UNIX base, which makes a lot of everyday tasks quicker for me, given that I develop almost exclusively for Linux web servers. However, you cannot be a web designer without thoroughly testing all work on the Windows platform and (shudder) Internet Explorer - it’s what the majority of the web browsing world are using. The sooner everyone switches to Firefox, the better. Thankfully, you can now dual boot Intel Apple Macs with Windows and OS X, so on those occasions where you do need to use the inferior Windows platform, you can at least do it on a decent piece of hardware.
My other main interests are, in no particular order: XBox 360; movies; football and of course my family.
Email: me at davidhurst dot co dot uk
(please note that I only accept work through my company Higher Sites Limited - if you would like more information, please call 01460 259925)