justinAbout Justin Rains
This site is ran by Justin Rains, the owner of Portal Planet, a Florence, KY based website design and hosting company. I started this blog for a few reasons:
- Communicate efficiently with customers
- Communicate efficiently with potential customers
- As a way to write articles
- As a way to comment on articles I come across while online
- As a medium to announce new clients
The postings from this blog used to show up in the “Portal Planet News” area of Portal Planet. The news headlines are only updated once a day to save bandwidth.
For those who would like to know I use a cron job that uses LWP::Simple to grab the feed. The feed is parsed in perl with the XML::RSS module.
My mailing list is powered by FeedBlitz and my RSS is monitored by FeedBurner.
Want a blog for your company? Need help managing and promoting your blog? Feel free to contact Portal Planet!
Personal info:
I started playing on computers in around the 4th grade. My family bought a used TI-99 4/a and it came with some games. Back then there were computer magazines that had pages of code for games written in B.A.S.I.C. I would spend hours typing in those games, many times only to find a typo I had made. In 5th grade my teacher knew a little about programming and helped me start programming and learning about 8-bit “sprites” made up of ones and zeros. Next up we bought a used Commodore C=64. This was awesome because it came with games and I knew people who I could trade games with! So I played alot of games and learned the LOGO language. LOGO was fun and it was my first bout with programming as you could code the “turtle” to make shapes. I also started using the B.A.S.I.C. sometime in the 6th-7th grade. It was ok and got the job done. Next up I got really nerdy! I started coding assembly language on the Commodore! Assembly is one step above ones and zeros. Extremely fast code but it is hard to learn. This was around the end of 8th grade. I actually wrote a functioning tractor pull game in assembly. It even had digitized sound and used the Commodore’s joystick! I never did market it.. Now I’m out of high school and in college. I was a chemistry/secondary education major with a minor in computer science. I took all of the required classes such as Pascal, C, C++.. When I was in school they did not teach web programming yet. I was in my 4th year of college and I landed a job at a computer consulting company doing web programming using Visual Basic DLLs. That was in 1996. I worked there for about 18 months and moved to another web programming position. I stayed there until the end of December 2000 after which I would be on my own running WSI.com Consulting which I changed the name to Portal Planet. I have not looked back since!
Now I run Portal Planet, I volunteer as a leader in the Cub Scouts, and do much more that I am recalling right now.