Offmessage

This blog is maintained by Andy Theyers, a Creative Technologist based in York, UK. I’m one of the directors and founders of Isotoma, a software development company that is frankly rather good at what it does. You should probably hire us. Projects include Forkd (for ourselves), Inside Nature’s Giants (for HarperCollins) and The Key (originally for DfE) among many many others. If you need web or mobile (or mobile web) applications building we’re here to help…

I have a lovely wife and three beautiful kids and a set of unhealthy obsessions that mostly revolve around cricket, rugby, tomatoes, curry, Python and Javascript. You can find me all over the Internet, from Forkd, through Last.fm and on to Twitter.

I started this blog a long time ago now, mainly as an experiment in web development. The advent of del.icio.us (which I’ve recently abandoned for pinboard) removed its primary purpose (a place to dump links), while the advent of ‘proper’ blogging software (like WordPress) removed its secondary purpose (a place to practice programming before I returned to it as a living).

Nowadays I use Django for both personal and work projects, but really can’t be bothered rejoining the massed ranks of those that wrote a blog platform. That means that this site remains on WordPress, despite my professional dislike of PHP.

For the historians out there this is version 4 of offmessage.com, versions 1 to 3 being cobbled together PHP, MySQL and hideously uncompliant HTML and CSS. I’m hoping this version is an improvement. I certainly know a lot better now, which helps…

It’s definitely prettier which, as anyone who knows me will testify, is more important than the content in my book.