About Keith

About Me

I’ve primarily been a full-stack developer since the mid-90s, with a large dose of general systems administration over the years.

I started building static web sites while still at university, before being employed to build slightly more dynamic ones using Perl and Cold Fusion.

As someone who likes wearing too many hats, I also helped write the book Instant JavaScript around the start of the millenium, and wrote interfaces for various tools in Tcl/Tk (and later wxPython, then Qt QML).

Over the next couple of decades, I found myself building more websites, first using PHP to continue creating bespoke admin areas, and then (after briefly toying with Drupal) moving to WordPress as a standard CMS to customise.

At the same time, my collection of Bash scripts (written for the usual server admin tasks) gradually morphed into a collection of Python scripts and Ansible playbooks instead, and will go alongside my other public repositories once they’ve been tidied up.

I’ve now come full circle, preferring static site generators when possible, and providing any additional functionality with plain vanilla JavaScript.

About This Site

This website was built with Jekyll on a local VM, then was deployed to this remote Vultr droplet when I committed on the main branch on April 26th, 2024.

The various photo galleries use a combination of PhotoSwipe and Masonry, tied together with a custom script that handles lazy loading when there’s more than half a dozen pictures on the page.

All the stock photos come from Pexels, the icons from SVGrepo (minified with the very useful SVG Path Editor) and the fonts from FontSquirrel:

Assuming I’ve not forgotten anything, all other content was created by Keith Drakard. Copyright © 2009 - 2024.

All posts on this site, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under a CC Attribution / Non-Commercial license - ie. fine for personal usage with a link back to this site. If you want to use them for anything else, send me an email.