Hi, I’m Paul Gregory (or Monki to some of my friends) and I’m the author, developer and designer of this website. For stylistic reasons the rest of this about will be written in third-person…

A rough guide to me

Paul is a 24 year old web developer living in South Manchester, England (of course). He works for the advertising and digital marketing firm Access Advertising, based out of an office block in Manchester’s Old Trafford area. This is Paul’s second professional posting since graduating from Manchester University in 2006. Before moving to Access Advertising in October 2007 Paul was the web developer for Greenhouse Creative, a design agency in the city centre. For more information about Paul’s life you can read the blog posts on this site or look for Paul on Facebook.

The website, the concept

The Monki website was launched in it’s initial form around Easter 2004. Its purpose was a learning platform for Paul whilst he studied web technologies and other computery things at university. This early, naive site was built as flat non-interactive HTML pages, but with the technical assistance of Paul’s good friend Robert Innes PHP was soon brought on-board and Monki morphed in to a blogging site. Subsequent website versions were created that utilised flat file data storage and then MySQL databases. Flash elements came and went like the seasons for Paul is a very indecisive character. Each iteration of the site was always hand coded and designed by Paul. Using his new-found interest in web development he managed to tailor his degree modules and dissertation project to fit this geeky hobby. The skills and qualifications obtained at university led to his first web developer job in 2006, two years after Paul’s first bedroom dabbles in programming for the web.

Fast forward to 2008 and we are witnessing a Monki revolution. Paul is going to break with a four year tradition and NOT use his own hand-built content management to power the latest Monki website. This time we’re using an open-source, free and highly customisable alternative, Drupal. This massive leap as come from Paul’s experience of using and loving the Drupal platform at work for all their CMS work. In theory, with Drupal, anything is possible!

How to get involved

Monki.info is your usual blog with user comments enabled. I really appreciate getting comments from readers - I beg of you to correct me where I’m wrong and send your praise where it is deserved! However, please read the Monki website user agreement before you post a comment.