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

I live and work in St. Andrews, Fife with my wife Gemma, and four-legged-friend Teabag.

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 GFI Max - a software company that specialises in remotely managed security solutions - 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 with the mutt, taking photos of those surroundings - in the hope one or two work out, and the odd spot of gardening.

Sports; I roughly follow Hartlepool and Newcastle 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 Mark Webber in particular and when time allows I write for my F1 personal project F1-Fans.co.uk.

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.

Another angle

I originally hollar from a seaside town south of the border, Hartlepool, where I was brought up on my parents' farm. I have a younger sister, and always wanted to be a bus driver.

I ventured north to St. Andrews to study maths at the university in 2004 (but soon defected to a mix of Economics, Management and Computer Science - mostly the latter). Oh and I met my wife here too.

To be honest we met as a matter of convenience - it was easier to find student accommodation as a group of four than two twos - and it took us probably 12 months to mutter more than a couple of sentences to one another. But it was all downhill from there and we got married at Craigsanquhar Hotel 2nd October 2009.

Teabag - our 9 month old Westie cross Jack Russel - is a complete muppet, but we love him to bits.

There are currently no plans to get a cat.

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.