About

I got my start working on the Internet early in 2006. I had just moved back to Canada from Japan after a 6-year stint teaching English.

Sun Set on Rising Sun

My last 2 years I was an English immersion kindergarten teacher. The job was very fulfilling in many ways because student progress was measured in giant steps. I had 7 straight contact hours (that’s time spent with students) with the same group of students for 2 years.

But what was good for students wasn’t good for me. Spending 7 stright hours with a large group of kids is exhasting enough, but I also had all the duties of the Japanese teachers except accounting. In case you didn’t know, Japanese companies make their employees work a lot and teachers are no exception.

So by the end of my 2-year stint, I was drained and never wanted to teach again.

Best Laid Plans

My intention upon returning to Canada was to make a go of being a professional guitarist. I did look at a number of graduate programs in fields that might actually make money, but I’d learned Jazz guitar on the stage and was addicted to the feeling where you lose yourself in the rhythm and music starts composing itself organically. The music is simultaneously an expression of each individual musician, but it is also independant of each and has a life of its own.

I can’t say that everytime I played I hit those lofty highs. But the sessions where I did hit the highs made long hours of tedious practice totally worthwhile.

So real work didn’t stand a chance. My audition was set for the best Jazz program in town and I was feeling pretty confident about my chances of impressing.

Then disaster. A week before my audition I woke up without feeling in two fingers of my left hand. The college gracefully rescheduled my audition a month later after the official audition was nominally over. Over that month, I taught myself to play with the two fingers that still had feeling, but by the time I went for my second audition my fingers had returned to 50% feeling which was good enough to play.

The audition went really well, but the panel was very concerned about my hand. One of the panel members commented that she thought it would be better if I waited a year to sort out my medical problems.

So I didn’t get in and a million doctors later the nerve problem continues to affect my hand with varying levels of severity. The next time it gets bad I get to go to the front of the surgery line for a minor procedure that should guarantee it never happens again, but the damage appears to be done.

My First Site

I found myself unable to do what I wanted, unwilling to go back to what I knew, and uninspired by any other options.

I settled on trying to market original educational children’s music that I’d written and recorded. So I started researching business, web marketing, HTML, CSS, PHP, and online education tools.

I eventually became convinced that a search engine for language learning tools would be more useful than adding a few tools to the mix.

So my first site was to be a search engine (well technically a search wiki). Trust me, start with something much simpler for your first site.

I hired a designer who subcontracted the programming and started to learn everything I could about web marketing and web writing while working with a temp-agency.

The project dragged on far too long and I started branching out into usability and web analytics trying to prepare myself to take ownership of the project.

The more I learned about SEO and usability, the more flaws I found in the project. So, instead of spending my rapidly dwindling finances on futher programming, I started exercising my PHP skills by going through the code and fixing things. I started by doing simple things like changing messages and prompts. With each pass through the code, I learned more and was able to fix more and eventually add functionality to the site.

But the project was fatally flawed. Editing was limited to the content owners and me with little incentive for content owners to contribute and there were a whole lot of other obstacles created by inexperience early in the planning stages.

I cringe at the thought of you seeing my failures, I don’t really like advertising my mistakes, but check out Ask Olli if you really want to see the mess. When I look back on the project, I had no business getting as much right as I did.

Connecting the Dots

At around the time I realised that Ask Olli would need to be redone from the ground up if it was ever to work, I started working as a technical writer at ASR, a small roof estimating software company. I already knew that I wanted to write web content or do website optimisation, but the discipline required to write procedures clearly and consistently is a skill every writer needs.

I also started a homebrewing blog, Life With Beer, to share some experimental beers that I’ve made and to practice writing regularly. It also gives me a site with enough traffic to actually practice some of the things that I’ve learned about SEO and Web Analytics.

These experiences have given me a breadth of knowledge about both the creative and technical aspects of working on the web that is necessary to balance the needs of visitors, businesses, and technology.