About

Hello. I’m David Artiss and this is my personal blog.

Living outside Nottingham I work in IT at the Head Office of Boots the Chemist. In my spare time I write WordPress plugins and generally dabble with web development. I’m married and have 2 lovely daughters.

I’ve been involved with IT since the age of 12, since being given a Commodore 64 as a Christmas present. I went on to excel at “Computer Studies” at school before moving onto doing much the same thing at college.

Specialising in graphics and utility work, I designed graphics for a number of Commodore 64 games, including Ghostbusters 2 and Tau Ceti, along with a number of budget releases. I also worked for Sega, creating driver software for their G-LOC arcade cabinet.

Missing the opportunity to go to University, I went straight into a job working as a mainframe programmer for Boots the Chemist over 20 years ago. Although moving through a variety of jobs since, including being briefly outsourced to IBM, they’ve all been with the same company and all within IT.

Web development has been a hobby for over 10 years and I’ve designed a number of successful websites. Combining this with WordPress has lead me to develop a number of free WordPress plugins – many have been written and I have many more planned! As of the 9th October 2010, I was the 10th most prolific WordPress plugin author¹. As a result of this I’ve worked with a number of companies relating to my WordPress work, including contracting for Automattic and Applian Technologies Inc.

This Site

Artiss.co.uk started off as a personal blog before becoming a professional site focusing on technology reviews. However, it’s now returned to its personal roots.

Site commentators have included CEO’s and company directors and technical discussion with the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and the BBC. Artiss.co.uk was also named as a weekly blog highlight by public relations service company Cision on 4th December 2009 and has been mentioned on the BBC website. Twice.

Feel free to look around and comment.

Location

David Artiss is based in Long Eaton, a market town located between Nottingham and Derby².

It’s located near both the M1 motorway and East Midlands Airport, is a stop on the Midland Main Line, has the Trent river running through it³ and a power station in the near-distance. It’s relatively quiet, but a central hub for the East Midlands.

West Park is a large, sprawling park on the outskirts of the town – cricket and football are played regularly and their are children’s play facilities too. A leisure centre is on the site too.

1. jointly with 3 other people – source [↩]
2. Long Eaton suffers from a dual-personality – technically within the borders of Derbyshire, it has both a Nottingham postcode and phone number [↩]
3. and is near to the superb Sawley Marina - a great place to see canal boats, to walk or to cycle [↩]