Hi, I'm Toby Mackenzie, a beginning web developer in the Akron/Cleveland, Ohio area. I do front and back end development at Cogneato, a small web firm in Akron. There I also do some SEO and other tasks. I have done one freelance project on my own, a site that I continue to maintain, and am interested in doing more.

I am skilled at programming and working with databases, as well as handling a number of other web related duties. I have an Associates degree in eBusiness management from Cuyahoga Community College. I have experience working with these web technologies and applications:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • XML
  • XSL
  • PHP
  • ASP
  • MySQL
  • SQL Server
  • Photoshop
  • Apache
  • *NIX administration
  • BASH scripting
  • JavaScript
  • JQuery

You can read more about me on my about me page or LinkedIn profile. See some of the projects I've worked on at my portfolio page. Feel free to contact me about web issues or if you know me.

My Web Development Blog

I also maintain a blog on Wordpress.com about various web development related things of interest. These are some of my recent posts:

Symfony: PHP Templating Engine and Global Variables

At Cogneato, we are using Symfony’s PHP templating engine to render our views for compatibility with our existing system and for allowing our developers to continue using the same language they’re used to. I was looking for a way to make various services and other “variables” globally available in all view files, like can be
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Using Symfony alongside an existing system

At Cogneato we’ve had a CMS that has been built up over more than a decade. We started working on a completely new system a while back to have a new and more powerful interface, add new features, and get rid of a lot of the cruft that the old system had from being developed
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Symfony and Custom Validation for Entity Based Forms

I recently started using Symfony’s form system at work instead of dealing with the forms entirely manually. I had found it confusing at first and so was reluctant to start using it, but now that I’ve started to figure it out, it’s proving rather nice. I still haven’t figured out how to create form classes
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Workings of Late: Symfony, Less, Responsive Design, Etc

As I’ve mentioned, at Cogneato we’ve been building a new version of our CMS using Symfony on the server side. I’ve spent a LOT of time with Symfony now. I like it and will be using it for some other projects outside of work as well. We’ve been working on some eCommerce type sites that
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JQuery UI Droppable and Handling Multiple Draggable Types per Droppable

JQuery UI Draggable and Droppable make it fairly easy to implement dragondrop on a web page. There are some things that are not easy to do with it though. One example is having a droppable accept multiple types of draggables with different responses depending on type, especially when added at different times (for instance, being
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