Hi there, my name is James L. Bantz, III (a.k.a. JB3). I am JB2′s son and humble custodian of this site. I am a full-time undergraduate student at The University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) just 24 credit hours shy of obtaining my BSEE (Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering). I am also already accepted to the graduate school of the same university to pursue my MSE with a concentration in electrical engineering this coming fall. I am also one member of a team of two, named The Fighting Mongooses, representing UTPA this year at the IEEE Conference Region 5 Robotics Competition to be held Tulsa, Oklahoma in early April.
When I’m not buried under 15-18 credit hours worth of school work, I like to spend my time exploring my new hobby of photography as well as honing my skills at website design. For those of you that have followed Bikenutz.COM over the past 7 years, the progress has been somewhat sporadic, as my free time is a rarity anymore. To help possibly launch this website into its next era with a fully functional storefront and showcase for my father’s photography and artwork, I began reworking the static HTML/CSS website that we had been maintaining in Adobe Dreamweaver into a dynamic, database-driven, and easy to maintain site built on top of the powerful WordPress CMS framework. The transition has been a little tedious and slow due to the fact that I have been scripting a Bikenutz.COM specific theme from the ground up that maintain’s the crisp and clean look and feel of the original site, while providing a future foundation for new features that JB2 and myself hope to launch this calendar year.
For those of you that either care or are interested, this site is architected using WordPress 3.3 augmented with powerful plug-ins such as WPtouch Pro, NextGEN Gallery, MapPress Pro, and Gravity Forms just to name a few. The content, photography, and artwork are crafted in Adobe Creative Suite 5 and Adobe Lightroom augmented with Nik Software’s powerful suite of plug-ins for both platforms as well Kodak’s EasyShare photo management software. The site itself is proudly hosted on Ubuntu Linux LTS 10.04 in the Cloud using Rackspace Cloud Servers. Since the beginning, JB2 and I have worked hard to make a clean and easy to read and navigate, cross-platform, and standards-based website. As we transition over to WordPress, it is our goal to maintain this attention to detail to enhance your experience of JB2′s photography, artwork, articles, and stories.
I invite you to please take the time and drop a comment and let us know how we are doing. Enjoy the site!