Who is Ratage?
Hi, my name is Matthew Ross. Ratage is just my online alias. I am a web designer/programmer. I started creating websites when I was 14 (back in 1998) and I never really stopped.
You can find me in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. I still live at home with my folks and drive a rusty old bomb. I am hoping now that I have graduated from university, I will have time to change all this.
Experience
I have been professionally creating commercial web pages for over three years now. My folio is not very big yet as my university course took up most of my time, with the balance in my part-time job at the local cinema. (Can I upgrade your order to a mega-supa-gigantic popcorn combo?)
I create websites to my clients' specifications. My clients do not just get my technical abilities though, they also get advice from an experienced web designer who knows all the ins, outs, ups, downs and every other direction of the web.
Education
2005: Completed my Bachelor of Multimedia Systems (Applications) degree at Monash University.
2002: Completed VCE at Highvale Secondary College
2002: Certificate III in Multimedia Systems at Swinburne Tafe (completed as a VET course in VCE)
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My Skills
If the following seems like techincal mumbo jumbo to you, don't worry. I wrote it for my fellow web developers.
The following is a list of technologies I believe I am proficient at using. I also point out where these technologies have been used (where I can).
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HTML
This language is what really got me interested in web scripting in the first place. Back then, there weren't all that many HTML tags, and web browsers displayed pages very differently to one anoter, making design 10 times more challenging back then. Jump forward almost ten years and here I am scripting almost 100% compliant HTML 4.01, and XHTML 1.0.
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CSS
Style Sheets is amongst the best things the World Wide Web Consortium ever conceived. Now I can write the same markup in half the time (or just write twice the amount in the same time).
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Javascript
Checkout my Minesweeper game in the Mini Entertainment box on the right of the page. The game was created using Javascript. I used DHTML (Dynamic HTML) following the DOM (Document Object Model) as much as possible.
Javascript also controls the Folio, Mini Folio and even the Mini Entertainment page changes.
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PHP4 and PHP5
I created the search box on this site from scratch using PHP5. I created it in a fully Object Oriented style, only later to remember my host still uses PHP4 (not so Object Oriented). After small changes to the code, I managed to get it running. The other main area of use for PHP on this site is to set and retrieve the entries for the Mini Shoutbox.
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MySQL
Whilst MySQL is my database of choice - probably more because it is pretty much automactially set up with PHP - I have also had experience using Microsoft Access and Oracle.
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