Mealybar.co.uk

About

Hi there! I'm Richard Sanderson and mealybar is my online alter ego.

I hail from St. Andrews, Fife where I live with my wife Gemma. My hometown is south of the border - Hartlepool, I came to St Andrews to go to university, and seem to have stayed.

Work

For fun and income I build websites. While my job title says I'm a web developer, I'd err towards web generalist as I relish persuing an idea from start to finish.

I work for ChilliConnect - a games software company that creates a games backend-as-a-service - where I get my hands dirty with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and Javascript on a daily basis.

Not work

When not behind the desk in the office, more often than not I'll be found behind the desk at home working on a personal project or two.

But when I'm not up to my elbows in code I enjoy getting out and about on my road bike, taking photos of those surroundings - in the hope one or two work out, and the odd spot of gardening.

Sports; I roughly follow Hartlepool United, attempt the odd round of golf - it would be criminal not to living in St. Andrews, but mostly it's about Formula 1. I support the Red Bull team and Daniel Ricciardo in particular.

While no longer participating I still have a soft spot for pigeon racing. At 14 it spurred my first "personal project" - a pigeon racing website - which undoubtedly paved the path for my web developing career - Pigeonbasics.com has since moved on but I still keep my eye in and am developing a pigeon results application called PigeonSportLive.

About this site

Mealybar.co.uk runs on my own CMS that I've been tinkering with for far too long - after all using Wordpress would be like a designer using Kubrick or TwentyTen.

Hosted by Media Temple it's a consolidation of ideas and good practice that I've picked up in the last few years. Images, CSS and Javascript are served from a subdomain, media queries generate an optimised layout depending on screen size and it's my first fully fledged attempt at HTML5.

Under the hood it's all object orientated PHP, MySQL and uses Apache mod_rewrite for user friendly URIs.

Contact

Tweet me @mealybar, or fire an email to hello [at] this domain.