About Me
My name (as you may already have guessed) is Ben Alman, but most people call me by my nickname, “Cowboy.” I’m a 30-something web developer living and working in the Boston Metro West area. I’m happily married to a wonderful woman, and when I’m not hanging out with her, I’m out playing funk bass or taking photos.
About My Work
Last year, I started working at a very cool company called Pangea Media as the lead front-end developer. One of the first things I was involved with was the “version 2.0” overhaul of our online quiz website Quibblo.com, a major part of which was creating the super-slick Quibblo quiz widget. Since then, I’ve been getting more involved in product development and design. As a result, I was heavily involved with the design of (in addition to the implementation of) a whole suite of client-side AJAX MySpace Quiz Apps—for example, the What Family Guy Character Are You? quiz—which have, in toto, over a million installs. Most recently, I’ve been spending the majority of my time co-designing and implementing a scalable, generalized content management system for our internal use. It’s powerful, flexible, and has more layers of caching than you can shake even an extremely large stick at.
Now that my time is generally split between application design and JavaScript development, which includes a number of generalized jQuery plugins (at last count, I had twelve plugins that are in various stages of completion, that will be posted here soon), I don’t spend nearly as much time developing in Flash as I used to. But that’s ok, because Adobe isn’t making their Flash IDE any easier to use. In addition to not spending a whole lot of time in Flash, I also don’t (willingly) spend a whole lot of time using PHP or Perl.. although I will get my hands dirty if needed.. like whenever I want to revamp my website.
About This Website
While benalman.com is built around the Movable Type blogging platform, I custom-coded much of the additional functionality myself, rewriting all the site templates from scratch. The portfolio page is dynamically driven by XSLT/XML, and all the content on the photo page is dynamically loaded from my Flickr account using the Flickr Services API.
Eventually, benalman.com will be expanded to include the music I have written and recorded, but this site is very much a work in progress.. so please be patient. If you’d like to check out some of my music in the meantime, please visit my previous (flash) website, Cowboy 4.0 and go to the music page.
(I guess that makes this website “Cowboy 5.0”)