Aaron Overton

Aaron Overton has been building websites and web applications since the web was first open for commercial use in the early 1990s. Mostly, Aaron is a freelancer (his company is called Heatherstone) for a wide variety of clients from small to enterprise in size. He also spent three years building web properties at Microsoft. His interesting side gigs have included teaching computer programming at a public high school and publishing tabletop miniature wargames. If you are having trouble finding him, find his wife, Nhu, and he's usually no more than 20 feet away.

CSS Magic: Making Two Lines into One

Published Fri, Feb 17, 17 at 2:00 am | Updated Thu, Dec 14, 17 at 5:27 pmby Aaron Overton

CSS is like magic in your browser. Since it’s my first post on the topic, I’ll point out that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS consists of a list of selectors. Each selector then has a list of attributes and values. Them’s some biggish techno-babble words, so I’ll explain a little more. A selector is a way of picking out specific content on a page. It can be very specific, like the title just before the third paragraph, or broad, like all text on the page. An attribute is some aspect … Read more

Three Things Arts Managers Should Know About Programmers To Save Money And Add Value

Published Thu, Jan 26, 17 at 2:00 am | Updated Wed, Jan 25, 17 at 11:01 pmby Aaron Overton

Many of my clients have wasted money they spent on programming. I try to tell them how not to, even as the beneficiary of some of this waste. If they insist, though, at some point there’s nothing left to do but shrug and accept a bit more cash in my pocket. The thing is, like most creative professionals, I like to do new and exciting work that efficiently solves problems way more than coding up the first iteration of some idea that is going to require many revisions before any of value … Read more