About me
My name is Mitch McConnell. I am a software engineer whose hobby is bird photography. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida and Narragansett, Rhode Island.
I have been photographing birds for about 15 years. I have been on about 3 "Instructional Photo Tours" with Art Morris, and owe him a big debt of gratitude for both instruction as well as for showing us all what to strive for.
I am self-employed as a software engineer, and am now working in the Web development area, using back-end technologies such as PHP and MySQL as well as HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the client side.
Previously, I worked for Cedar Point Communications in the SS7 protocols group. I am primarily responsible for the T1/E1/T3 drivers, but have also worked on call processing for CAS signaling and recorded announcements.
Prior to this I worked at two other startups: Northchurch Communications (acquired by Newbridge Networks in 2001) and Teloquent Communications (sold in a fire-sale).
I welcome any and all questions and/or comments about this site, or anything else for that matter!
About excellentbirds.com
I bought this domain in the earliest days of the web, and originally had a static web site of some of my bird photos, developed using a text editor.
I had played around with other HTML editors, but decided to buy and learn Dreamweaver. My other goal was to learn PHP and MySQL, and that is really what this site is about, i.e., my learning curve for DW, PHP, and MySQL. Along the way I have had to learn about CSS and Javascript as well.
HERE is a link to another "learning exercise" site I developed to keep track of my DVDs between my house in Rhode Island and my condo in Florida. I created it with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL (no Dreamweaver) to continue to develop my PHP skills.
Mitch