About
clokey2k (+Paul Cloke)
My name is Paul and I live in the South West of the UK. Web-design and Development is hobby which I have been toying with for ages. I have become rather proficient in the Web’s front-end languages, and the ability to develop in PHP, C#, and Java.
In my day job I’m a Customer Engineer for NCR (wiki). It’s a role that requires a considerable amount of my time problem solving, and seeing first hand how a users experience can make or break a product. It keeps me on the road, and out of mischief. It also pays one or two bills!
When not working I enjoy watching TV, be it a film or entertaining TV Series. My girlfriend and I enjoy each others company, and the company of our black Labrador Domino. I enjoy long walks on the beach, or the moors with friends or alone.
My music tastes are quite varied ranging from ‘Meat Loaf’ to ‘Katy Perry’. I have a friend in a band a very good band ‘Emerald Hill‘ – visit the band’s page to listen and download.
clokey2k.com
This site (clokey2k.com) has been something I have been playing around with for years – adding things and changing things. It is through this trial and error that I have learned most of my skills.
The old version of this site became very cluttered with a user system that was not required on your average personal website. I decided to freshen it up in 2007-8, retiring the old PHPNuke installation.
The site is now generated using WordPress, a very popular Blogging system, which also lends itself to Content Management very well. The theme is coded by myself and is in its second incarnation. It boasts a very clear typography using some good tips from the CSS wizard Harry Roberts.
WordPress supports community plugins making some additions extremely trivial. I use as selection of plugins to enhance my site, they include:
- Askimet – Comes with WordPress, and does a good job against comment spam.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – Adding the Analytics code isn’t difficult, but this adds a good set of custom variables to produce better depth to your reports.
- SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – Making any code I include for viewing easily readable.
- W3 Total Cache – Pumped full of caching options to speed up the download of the site, and reduce the server load in the process.
The site hosting comes graciously from eUKhost (Get hosted too by eukhost.com).