Brian J. Dillard

I've got an ever-growing collection of tattoos, most designed by my buddy Kevin Lytle of Eternal Tattoo (Livonia, MI) and inspired by my love of comics books. A catalog of my tattoos and their inspirations can be found at my Flickr account, the front door of which lives here:

blogs & stuff

FriendFeed

Tumblr

Twitter

social networks

Facebook

Friendster

MySpace

Yelp

photos

Flickr

music, books, etc.

Last.fm

Muxtape

Shelfari

programming blog

Agile Ajax

open source projects

Really Simple History

tutorials

Ajax Overhaul at IBM developerWorks

presentations

Slideshare

movie review portfolio

interactive html page

dormant music sites

armchair dj

plastikfan

current c.v.

PDF format

networking

LinkedIn

This site is my personal playground. It's a place to aggregate content by and about me. More importantly, it's a place try out new technologies. As such, it's a permanent work in progress - but a "beta" tag would be a bit much, wouldn't it?

The current version shows off my obsession with all things jQuery, but it's horribly incomplete. Still, the code that displays my FriendFeed stream shows off a bit of my JavaScript mojo, even though I really need to give up my homegrown templating library and use the best-of-breed open-source plugin.

This site is a disaster in IE6 and, to a lesser extent, IE7. That in no way reflects on my ability to code for these browsers when I'm being paid to do so.

Goals for the next version of this site:

• Reincarnation as an actual Rails application instead of just client-side code with no back end.
• Better jQuery code, including some plugins I plan to open-source.
• Better progressive enhancement, including some WAI-ARIA stuff.
• A much more extensive stylesheet switcher.
• Integration with Really Simple History so the back button works.
• Some CSS filters and JavaScript magic to get the site working again in IEx.

Oh, and I plan to modernize the movie-review clips application.

I'm a web developer and writer living in Chicago.

I've been a web developer since 1996. I focus on the view layer: CSS, HTML, JSP and especially JavaScript. Lately I've been learning Ruby on Rails.

I've been writing movie and music reviews since the early '90s. My music site, Armchair DJ, has been dormant for a long time but I'm slowly coming around the the idea of relaunching it.

In the meantime, I blog professionally, writing about user interface technologies.

As the headline says, I'm a big fan of both tattoos and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I'm also a cycling enthusiast and a vegan, but I try really hard not to be annoying about either.