The Turning Gate

Colophon

Hello. My name is Matthew Campagna and The Turning Gate is my personal weblog.

I'm American, born 1978, and grew up in Maryland. I hold a B.A. in English Literature and have worked, briefly, in book publishing and as a newspaper reporter. Since 2002, I've spent a total of five years, off and on, living and working in Seoul, South Korea as an ESL kindergarten and elementary school teacher.

My time in Korea is now coming to a close. I'm enrolled to begin studies at the Hallmark Institute of Photography, beginning September 2008, in pursuit of a career in professional photography.

I am also a freelance web-designer specializing in web standards-based XHTML and CSS. I have a number of regular clients, and accept work as both web designer and web design consultant. In addition, I have produced a number of web photo gallery templates for Adobe Lightroom's Web module, available as free downloads here at The Turning Gate.

Finally, I'm obsessed with the new Battlestar Galactica, the only thing on television worth watching.

About the The Turning Gate

Publishing & Dependencies

The Turning Gate is built upon the latest version of the Textpattern content management system, extended by various plugins. Textpattern is powerful, flexible and the center of an incredible support community.

The site also employs Michael J. I. Jackson's Shadowbox for viewing media, and the MooTools Javascript framework.

Design

The Turning Gate is hand-coded using Coda and CSS Edit, with images created in Adobe Photoshop CS3. File transfers are handled by Transmit. The same applies to all of my web photo gallery templates for Adobe Lightroom.

Hosting & Services

The Turning Gate is hosted by SiteGround. After nightmarish experiences with GNXOnline, I moved to SiteGround and have found them to provide wonderful service, with friendly and responsive customer support and an easy-to-use, well organized control panel - all at an affordable price.

Site traffic and statistics are now being tracked by Mint. So far, so good.

I use Flickr for photo storage, as well as web photo galleries of my own design with local image storage.

Macintosh

My workhorse is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard. My previous system was a 15-inch Powerbook G4.

I [heart] my Mac.

Camera

Canon EOS 40D, Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM, Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM, Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM, Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM, Canon Speedlite 580EX, an assortment of Lowepro camera bags.

Photos processed using Adobe Lightroom, and sometimes Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Freelance Web Design Services

Turning Gate Design is my freelance web design business. I specialize in small business sites, blogs, portfolios, image galleries and Lightroom web photo gallery templates. For a more information about my services and portfolio, see here.

Contact

For questions, comments, Lightroom template support, typos or just to say hi, feel free to contact me using this form.