About the Z’s – this article came up because we were recently contacted by an old friend and comrade from my award site days. It seems his indice came across Flash by Z and one of the panel suggested us as a possible candidate as a featured site of the month. Now Desi’s debut article for the new blog was endearing and wonderfully written but as her story unfolded, it was a tale of love lost and gained and less about how the site came to be. With that said, I realized that the netizen really knew nothing about us as people. My thought is who really cares as long as the content is fresh and somewhat interesting; hence, the reason Desi does most of the writing these days.
I try to stick to my old realm of site design articles since my prose would give an English teacher a nightmare. Anywho, I wrote the “bio.” It was supposed to be in a personal format and not like a professional portfolio and it was to follow no form. After I completed it, I realized I had written something that would give our random visitor some insight regarding the creation of a “personal” website. It is our adventures through the web and our daily life.
Well, I do digress, here is what I came up with regarding the site and its history. If you have a personal site, your story may be very similar.
My name is Eric Zabinsky, I am the owner/webmaster of flashbyz.com previously known as Z3 Design. My wife Desi and I are everyday people that enjoy spending way too much time on the internet. With that said, a website was created through a trial and error process. It is now a dead domain long closed (zabinsky.com). Text and images were about it in those days. I still remember the first time I saw an image actually work on my website. WOW! Cutting edge technology.
Current interests include staying abreast of current internet “technologies” such as XHTML, PHP, CSS, AJAX, and FLASH. These have become friends and hobbies. They are daily learning experiences through that same trial and error learning process and I enjoy sharing what I learn with others.
Flash by Z was created originally as a stepping stone for new designers and award programs. It eventually grew into something completely different as my wife and I fell in love with the Possum Kingdom lake community. The passion was now sharing information about the lake so we added a homemade photo gallery created with PHP and CSS. I created a CMS for the photo gallery and Desi pulled out the camera. We worked together and watched the gallery grow.
Flash by Z was something of a child. We nurtured it with content. Like anything else, it gives back whatever you put into it. Our child grew into an online home featuring a plethora articles pertaining to award programs, beginning web design, and the lake. The child now contained a gallery powered by PHP and a homemade CMS that powered all the above. The portfolio shows the evolution of how many different faces this domain has had in the past three (3) years.
Three years later we stopped going to the lake as much but we still enjoyed surfing the web and we still wanted to share our experiences. None of it really fit into the scope of Flash by Z. So, our new child was born… Flash by Z _the blog. If you are not familiar with blogs, this article may be interesting to you. PHP is the greatest thing since sliced bread and creating themes for the WP framework is a snap. So, we added WP to our domain and started work on a theme. It changes depending on the season. For instance; recently, we went to see “Alice in Wonderland” and Burton’s imagination spurred a new inspiration so the current theme for our blog is very Burton-esk. The overall concept here is that the blog allows us to create, write, or display whatever hits our fancy that day without leaving the confines of the original Flash by Z scope. They are two separate entities within the confines of the same domain. My wife enjoys the strange and unusual as you will find out as you click through our blog. A bit of bias may be in play but I think she is a terrific writer and she keeps the content fresh with her original articles and topics.
Well, enough rambling. If you are interested, here is a bit more about us. Desi and I were High School sweethearts and here is “our beginning.” –EZ
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