About Me

Hi, I'm Steve. Welcome to my personal website / blog. I'm 34 and live in Santa Barbara, California with my wife and two sons. I've worked in web design and development since 1999 and maintain a number of websites in addition to this one. They include:

As that introduction might allude to, I guess I'm something of a geek. The funny thing is, I never intended this to happen. In my college days at UCSB (1993-1998), I was an extremely avid surfer and skateboarder. I used my archaic Gateway 2000 486/66 only to write term papers and play California Games (ancient even then) on occassion. I was not really into computers or the internet at all until about 1999, long after most "true" geeks of my generation.

However, that year I got a new computer and my first internet connection. I found myself captivated by the online world and all it had to offer. In short order I began actively participating in Usenet, particularly alt.surfing and alt.surfing.longboard. A friend from alt.surfing named "NeoN" (you know who you are!) turned me on to HTML and the rest, as they say, is history...

Today I enjoy the ongoing challenge of learning new and exciting things in web design and development. So much has changed, and yet the fundamentals of a good, useful site remain. Good content, intuitive navigation, and a design well-suited to the site's intended audience will always be a winning combo. That said, new sites launch daily, often with plenty of money backing them, which fail to adhere to this simple formula. The poor outcomes resulting are entirely predictable.

Besides web development, my interests include an array of mostly outdoor activities, including surfing, paddleboarding, freediving, bicycling, and flying radio controlled model aircraft (especially gliders). As of this writing (September 2007), I am on a "fitness jihad" with the end goal being the completion of the 2008 Catalina Classic, a 32 mile paddleboard race between Catalina Island and Manhattan Beach.

I hope you enjoy visiting this site and thank you for your visit.

Steve Lange
September, 2007

 

About this Site

This site uses a combination of HTML, CSS, PHP and a MySQL database. It was created 100% from scratch by your's truly and has been sort of a sandbox for me in terms of learning new techniques. The existing site is the third or fourth design iteration, but the underlying database architecture has remained pretty much the same throughout. "If it ain't broke..."

The blog functionality originally started off as a sort of public messageboard where anyone could post pretty much whatever they wanted. I don't even think the word "blog" existed when the site originally went live in 2001 (I could be wrong but "whatever") It worked pretty well till the advent of the spambots, the bane of public forums and messageboards everywhere. In response, I transitioned the site to more of a true "blog" approach. I still need to add trackback and comment functionality, which I also plan to (someday) do from scratch. Sure, I could just install WordPress or Moveable Type, but where's the challenge in that? ;)

 

Various and sundry links

Over the years, I've created a few pages and mini-sites targeted to specific interests. These pages have been popular over the years, so I will continue to link to them here.