First Blog Post

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It is only fitting that my first blog post should be on the eve of leaving for “An Event Apart” in Chicago.

My name is John F Croston III; I live the Washington, DC area and am a consultant at the Pentagon. I use the following items/processes/techniques to get work done on the Army G-1 website.

  • XHTML
  • CSS
  • Web Standards
  • Microformats
  • Accessibility
  • JavaScript
  • ASP
  • SQL
  • Tables only if I have to for tabular data
  • Validators for XHTML, CSS, 508, Bobby, etc.

Most of the posts for this blog will be about the web and technology, with some things from everyday life. It will be of things I have learned and stuff I have tried; sometimes it will work others it will not.

I have been trying really hard to learn as much as I can about accessibility. Two things have put me on this path. One being working at the Pentagon you get to see soldiers that have come Walter Reid hospital that have lost hands, limbs, their eye sight, etc. The second thing was meeting a really nice woman named Pat Pound while the SXSW 2007 Trade Show.

I spent sometime with Pat having her look at my work website for a bit while talking with her. She said my website looked good for the short time see spent going over it. For those that might have her you know see is blind or visually impaired. After the conference I have sent her a few notes to get her thoughts of how it would best be to do certain things from her perspective.

The other people’s blogs, presentations, etc. that I have learned from (not the full list):

I plan on improving the layout of this blog as I learn more about WordPress and PHP.

I guess that is all for now. I hope to add more to the blog as the conference goes on over the next few days.

4 thoughts on “First Blog Post”

  3. Welcome to the blogging world John and thanks for the 2 nods. There is a great web standards community in the DC area, so I am sure you’ll be able to get in with a good crowd down there.

    I am curious…the Pentagon is using ASP? I know a lot of other government agencies here in the states have standardized on ColdFusion. I’ve done some training work with the EPA in previous years and we always had interesting discussions about what they could or couldn’t use for back-end languages.

    Enjoy AEA Chicago; it looks like a great event!

  4. Thanks, guys for the words of encouragement. Sorry the comments did post right away I have the approval switch still set on and did not check my mail in two days, with traveling to Chicago.

    Martin,

    Chicago is great so far, got to the Art Institute of Chicago this afternoon. See you at the bar Thursday night. It looks like I can make as long as I do not get caught in traffic leave Columbus, OH.

    Sorry N!ck about thinking you were first those darn default setting.

    Aaron,

    I have already met up with a bunch of them (Jason Garber, Cindy Li – now of SF, and others) at the Refresh DC group meeting or at the DC BarCamp.

    I do consulting for the Army G-1 and all of our stuff is in ASP. I think it is one of those things that have been around for years and they still use it. I know ARMY.MIL uses PHP with the CMS system they built. And another consulting company in our area uses ColdFusion.

    Thanks, all I will enjoy AEA it off to dinner and what ever comes after that.

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