User:DoriSmith

​

Dori Smith

Me, inside Wikipedia This user has rollback rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify) This user is not a Wikipedia administrator, but would like to be one someday. This user has been identified as an Awesome Wikipedian and was awarded their own day. This user edits on Wikipedia under her real name. This user is happy to give quick and easy access to her Wikipedia contributions. This user is happy to give quick and easy access to her Edit count. This user is block free - (see my block log here!). This editor is a Veteran Editor and is entitled to display this Iron Editor Star. This user reserves the right to completely screw up her own edits. en-5 This user is able to contribute with a professional level of English. A, B, and C This user prefers the serial comma. “…”! US vs. UK This user uses “logical quotation marks”. Internal punctuation leads to factual errors. It's not a style issue! This user thinks that registration should be required to edit articles. This user believes that process is important on Wikipedia and is opposed to its circumvention. In an emergency, this user may be slapped with a trout. This user respects copyright and other intellectual property rights. @ This user can be reached by email. This user contributes using a MacBook Pro. This user supports the implementation of flagged revisions. This editor is a WikiGnome. This user has created 3 userboxes This user has created a global account. DoriSmith's main account is on Wikipedia (English). This user has an SHA-512 committed identity. See this userbox's invocation. Flexible This user deals with edits, deletion, and creation of pages individually instead of unilaterally and encourages others to do so. wiki-3 This user is an advanced Wiki syntax coder.

Me, outside Wikipedia This user is a professional writer or journalist. js-5 This user is a professional JavaScript programmer. HTML-5 This user is a professional HTML user. css-5 This user is a professional Cascading Style Sheets user. This user has published 18 books ¶ This user is a professional editor. Mom This user is a mother, and proud of it! This user was born in the U.S. State of California. SoCal This user hails from Southern California. UCI This user is an alumnus of the University of California, Irvine This user lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. ..... This user is a professional procrastinator. INTJ This user has an INTJ personality per the Myers-Briggs typing system. MX-5 Zoom! Zoom Mazda Miata Top Down enthusiast Web This user has a website. This user maintains a blog at Backup Brain. ff This user has a FriendFeed account at dori. This user Tweets on Twitter as @dori. u This user keeps a calendar of events on Upcoming. Linkedin This user has a LinkedIn profile as user dorismith f This user maintains a Facebook profile at dorismith. This user has a Google profile at dorismith. + This user has a profile on Google+ This user keeps delicious weblinks as dorismith. f This user has a Flickr account as dorismith.

Like a lot of other people on the Web, I started off programming in high school. Unlike a lot of other people on the Web, that was in 1977, before most of them were born.

I learned BASIC on a machine that looked like a typewriter, which was connected via an incredibly slow line to a mainframe several miles away. I found that programming came easily to me and when I realized that I could get paid good money for solving puzzles, a light went on and I said, "This is for me!"

So far as web programming goes, I was mostly in the right place at the right time. I first got online in the early 1990s, as was normal for a computer geek. In the mid-'90s Java and JavaScript came along and they just looked really, really easy to someone who had been programming as long as I had. At that same point I was completely fed up with my dead-end mainframe programming job and was looking for something different, so I jumped ship in 1996 and taught myself rudimentary HTML, Java, and JavaScript.

What I found was that what came so easily to me wasn't quite so easy to non-programmers, and I started teaching classes. I then realized that understanding concepts and being able to explain those same concepts to non-technical people are two very different beasts and that while lots of people can do the former, not so many can do the latter. The same light that had gone on in 1977 went on again in 1997 and I switched gears and changed over to primarily write and teach about web programming.

In 1997, I co-wrote JavaScript for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide, and in 1998 I wrote Java for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide. By late 1998, the idiot web design firm I was working for pissed me off one too many times, and I realized that I was making more in my evening and weekend hours writing than I was in my full time gig. I left there in October 1998, and I've been (more or less) self-employed ever since.

Since then, I've co-authored Dreamweaver CS5 for Windows and Mac: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit Press, 2010) and Mac OS X Unwired (O'Reilly Media, 2004). The current edition of my Java book is the 2^nd (Peachpit Press, 2002) and the current edition of our JavaScript book (now titled JavaScript: Visual QuickStart Guide) is the 8^th (Peachpit Press, 2012). Along the way, we also wrote Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide (Peachpit Press, 2009).

I've taught and spoken at a number of conferences (among them: Macworld Expo, Builder.com, O'Reilly's OS X Conferences, SxSW, ADHOC, Geek Cruises, and Thunder Lizard) and written for a few magazines, both online and print. For some reason, any magazine that has named me a contributing editor has shortly followed that by going under (NetProfessional and MacWEEK.com, RIP), so now I stick to freelance work for folks I like.

I'm also List Mom and publisher of the Wise-Women's Web Community, a thriving list of several hundred web designers and developers (guys are welcome too, btw).

In my free time, I goof off by adding to my weblog, Backup Brain, which is where I put the writing that no one will pay me for.

According to Wikipedia's own guidelines, I qualify as someone who should have an entry (given a couple of best-selling books), but I don't (and do not want one). On the other hand, after more looking around, I was stunned by the number of topics (mostly people) that don't have WP articles; enough so that I started a list. I would be happier if that list was shorter.

I live in Healdsburg, California, which is why I keep a close eye on Healdsburg and its associated pages.