The Short

Name: Peter Franceschi (yes…no middle name sadly)
Born: February 24th, 1981
Height: 6’
Weight: 170lbs
Education: BS in Information Technology from RIT
Fast Food: Wendy’s
Dine-in: Authentic Chinese
Music: Brit-pop, Alternative, Classic Rock, 80’s
Sports: Currently playing volleyball, others include golf, baseball, and skiing
Marital Status: Single (ladies…do drop me a line)
Occupation: Media Developer / Web Developer / Web Programmer
Hobbies: Gaming, Design, Photography, Music, Travel/Culture

The Long

Background

Peter has been working with the tangled mess known as the web since the mid 90’s starting with his endeavors with the original HotDog Pro and Photoshop 4 around 1996. From here spawned a rather unhealthy obsession with all things web that has since spread to design, typography, and most recently standards and accessibility. Though neither a designer, developer, nor programmer by trade or education, Peter finds himself in the unique position of being versatile and flexible in a variety of situations. A strong advocate of the W3 and Web Standards Movement, Peter recently finds himself once again revamping his skill-set to accommodate the ever changing web.

Experience

Peter is a recent graduate (2004) of the Rochester Institute of Technology where he received a BS in Information Technology. Here he studied and concentrated in multimedia and web development, web programming, and a minor in creative literature and fiction. While attending RIT Peter was graciously awarded honors on the Deans List for four quarters. Peters experience comes from a multitude of positions held in the industry; both cooperative and employed. His last position as a media developer at The Harris Corporation was as part of the corporate Media Team. His responsibilities included maintenance of about a half dozen databases, programming in ASP/.Net, and the developing of intranet applications to support our products and services.

Interests

When not coding, designing, or reading up on emerging technologies Peter is not unlike anyone else that finds themselves with the informal identity of “twenty something”. Peter has been a devout fan of gaming in all of its forms since childhood and his original Nintendo. When attempting not to be a couch potato Peter enjoys playing a variety of sports including but not limited to: Skiing, Volleyball, Golf, Baseball, and the occasional game of Pong. At the end of the day Peter can typically be found enjoying a good episode of Japanimation, Scrubs, or Lost gaming in such greats as Warcraft 3 or reading any of a number of books on cooking and design.

Colophon

What is 88 West?

88 west was developed approximately two years ago to be the playground and showcase for aspiring developer Peter Franceschi. The name 88 west was chosen after nearly two months of soul searching, foreign language translations, and late night encyclopedia readings. A play on the famous ‘Route 66’ of the late 50’s 88 west is the imaginary connection between the author and his online presence and serves as an endless road from which to experiment and travel on in his web endeavors. It also serves as a soapbox from whence to rant about everything else. 88 west was designed on a custom built AMD/XP machine put together by the author himself approximately one year ago. The operating system of choice is XP Home edition. The preferred developing platform is a mixture of a very old copy of Homesite and a recently purchased Adobe GoLive that is working out quite nicely. For graphic work, Photoshop is the doctor’s tool. All code is supposed to be standards compliant however some bending of that rule is inevitable but I strive for perfection always.

CMS

The content management system (CMS) of choice is Textpattern. 88 West v1.0 was originally all coded in MovableType however my personal experience with MT were less than favorable so I moved on, and an excellent decision it was. I highly recommend Textpattern to all those considering making the move. Come on, everyone else is doing it.

Typography

Typography for the site was chosen based on the title font, Helvetica Light. Accompanying body copy and link text is compiled in Helvetica/Lucida/Lucida Grande depending on your operating system. Though research has proven that people are more likely to retain knowledge after reading serif text as opposed to text without serifs, I simply prefer the clean feel “sans-serifs”.

Lastly, I would like to put a paragraph here for all those in the industry that provide inspiration on a daily basis. Many names of which you will find on the home page, there are plenty more however. They all deserve a credit but there is only so much space. Thank you to all for providing insight, inspiration, and a community from which to inquire, experiment, and learn.