My last day at the Texas Tech Office of Communications & Marketing was Friday, July 17th. That was my first job coming out of college and I received a lot of great experience and support while working there. I learned a lot more about PHP and using CodeIgniter to develop web applications as well as customizing WordPress as a CMS. These are excellent skills to have, and I don’t know if I would have gotten them at the level that I have now if not for this job.

The people are great and it was a pleasure to work there, but I felt like it was time to move on and see what else was out there. I’m moving back to the Dallas area to be closer to my family and will see what opportunities I can find over there.

It does feel great though to not have to go to bed at a certain time in order to wake up at a certain time. I love the freedom I have now.

If anyone is moving to Lubbock looking for a job and knows PHP and WordPress really well, let me know and I’ll forward on your info. Texas Tech is a great place to work.

Also, if you have any WordPress projects or web applications you need done, contact me.

Now comes the FUN part.. PACKING!

I was mentioned in a Lubbock-Avalanche Journal article about the PassOrCatch2008.com site

“Lisa DuBois-Low and Ryan Pharis from Tech’s communications and marketing department designed and built the site.”

Don Williams wrote the story about how it’s been getting some great recognition around the country. I was watching the Tech vs. K State game on Saturday and the announcers were talking about how it was a neat idea and a good campaign that our athletic department put together. Plus it’s gotten a lot of buzz on the blogs and message boards which is nice to see. Most comments are positive, but you’ll always have the negative posters who like to hate on Tech.

So that was really cool to see, and kinda made my day.

You can read the full article: Tech site gets national attention.

On another note, the LAJ’s RedRaiders.com site is built on WordPress. I think it’s another great example of what wp can do and it’s versatility. Very nice job to whoever implemented that. I’m impressed.

I’ve never posted from outside of wordpress before. I’m testing out the “Blog Post” feature of Word 2007.

I’m interested to see if it adds clean html markup to the post. When you copy and paste from word to wordpress’ editor, it brings in extraneous mso code.

Edit:

What a cool feature of Word and WordPress! That’s very nice to know. I’ll have to check out Windows Live Writer now.

The fine folks at We Love WP and eduStyle have put Texas Tech Today in their galleries here and here.

We Love Wp focuses on displaying standout sites/designs that use the WordPress platform as their cms. The sites featured here give you a great indication of the power and flexibility that you get free with wp.

eduStyle showcases university-based web designs. They have quite a nice community of campus web masters and designers over there.

I’ve always wanted something I’ve designed to be in showcases like these. It’s really cool to have that happen.

I submitted it to some other CSS galleries, so we’ll see how that goes too.

I just got back from my parent’s for the weekend and had a great time. It was a good birthday weekend for me. Now it’s back to work!

I was thinking of making a simple plugin that updates the author’s birthday based on the birth date option that they can set in the admin panel. That way I wouldn’t have to set it every year in my about page.

The perfect way to end a good day is a subway spicy italian.

I’m working on my theme, and need another post to see how the front page should work. So, that’s basically all this post is about. Pretty much just a test. Have a happy and safe Memorial Day though.

Welcome to RyanPharis.com. This will be a site about web development, wordpress, php, and various other things. I’ll hopefully be able to impart some of my wisdom to the googlers and would like to help out as many people as I can. Check out the about page for more details about me.