Me
My name is Matt Wilkinson (hence mattwilko.com). I was born in 1990, in Nuneaton. I have since lived in Hinckley (Leicestershire, England) all my life, and currently study Chemistry, Physics, Maths and F.Maths at John Cleveland College.
I am a bit of a geek (meaning totally, completely and wholly), and fill most of my day with geeky activities - meaning I am on the computer for a significant portion of my time.
I enjoy programming and web design, having practiced both since about the age of 10 or 11. I was given this domain as a birthday present by my dad at the ripe old age of 14, after him seeing me constantly making and updating domains/sites at various free registrars like .tk. I am quite sure there are still some embarassing fragments from times past still dredging themselves up on Google, but I haven't seen any for a while.
I have since come to love PHP, due to it's simplicity and ubiquity on the web today. I have written some quite advanced applications with PHP, but most are for my own purposes, like a file manager on the web server on my home PC, so I could remotely manipulate the filesystem. I have also written several scripts and useful oddbods for some clients, who unfortunately usually tend to disallow me to publicise any work I do for them.
Within the past couple of years, I've been offering my skills as a service,, and I still offer it to this day. I design, develop and support websites from start to finish, or can do any of the three. I can also alternatively write a PHP script to do some complex data collection, such as RSS, search result scraping etc.
Within recent months, I have also become more and more enthralled with the .NET platform. I have always had an interest in writing Windows programs, but never really found the right way of going about it. .NET solved this for me and now I actively develop in VB.NET as well as PHP. My most recent .NET project is Shell.NET, but I have also created others, WiiMedia being the main one, however this is now discontinued due to a better solution being available, and my original code being wiped out.
My Website
mattwilko.com has now been running for over 4 years, and I finally intend to actually have a real blog on it with some useful content. In the past it has interstitally been many things, many of which I would not really like to name due to sheer embarassment. Either way, I intend for it now to be a blog/project/portfolio site (specfic, no?) just to gather together all the stuff that is me.
In case it wasn't immeadiately obvious, when I build a website, I like to make sure there are no extraneous bells and whistles and other annoyances. All my pages are optimised to the point of being quite ludicrous, with my backgrounds consisting of 1 pixel wide images, and images only being used where a solid colour wouldn't do. There is also no javascript at all on the site (except the reCAPTCHA boxes, but that can't be helped) and everything is as standards compliant as possible, including no CSS hacks! I hope this goes to show how much care and attention I put into building not just this website, but every website I craft.