Thomas Ballard is a web developer most recently from Utah. He graduated from Alta High School and attended University of Utah and Salt Lake Community College until being drawn away during the Internet boom. He has worked for Northsky, an Orem, Utah based web hosting company that created and operated Freeservers.com and Community Architect. Thomas was acquired by About.com with other resources of Northsky in 2000. About.com was a top 10 Internet website during that time, a part of the traffic being contributed by the hosting platform from Northsky. About.com was later acquired by Primedia. In 2004 Primedia sold the hosting division (then called About Web Services) to United Online. United Online managed some recognizable brands, NetZero, Juno, and Bluelight (popular dial up ISP providers), Classmates, and MyPoints, and most recently FTD. United Online reorganized About Web Services as Mega Web Services, and Thomas was a part of the teams the built and supported various web hosting properties. Thomas Ballard currently works for NetZero as a senior web producer.
In addition to his technical work, Thomas has created and produced software including games, client-side and web applications. Among them the game Hyper Lander. He's always been an avid self-learner (often the newest technologies are not taught by traditional educational sources until they are no longer cutting-edge). Along with a passion for learning, Thomas has a passion for teaching. Hyper Lander originated in the 80's as an Apple II program designed to help expose programming students to game programming concepts. The industry has come along way since those days, but the enjoyment of producing useful applications to solve problems or provide entertainment continue to be a passion of Thomas'.
In answer to a variety of templating approaches either captive in proprietary software packages, or too dependent on server resources, Thomas created an approach jokingly coined CCSTAL (caching client-side templating abstraction layer--a tongue-in-cheek tribute to annoying acronyms). The CCSTAL technique is outlined here.
He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two children where he's vowed to harness the power of the sun to cast off his pasty ghost-like complexion and to cease wearing socks with sandals.
Thomas Ballard maintains a personal web page with links to examples, code samples, learning resources, games.
You can find more info here on the wiki page.