About

Hello, my name is Toby Normoyle and thank you for visiting my site.


Who am I?

A consummate gamer, a lover of technology, one of the hardest working people in any industry, and someone you want on your team.



I am also the creator of Atomic Illumination.



No creator is an island

While I may have designed the layout, written the scripts, and created 99% of the content for this website it would have been all for naught without the help of others.


So I would like to give thanks to everyone and everything that helped me to get this website off the ground:


  • Brian Spicer for feedback, beta testing, and amazing grammar and spelling corrections.
  • Reed Knetzger for feedback and excellent technical bug finds.
  • Chris Harding, Darryl Shack, and Jennifer Nakamoto for feedback and beta testing.
  • Jeff Holbrook for loaning me a PlayStation VITA so I could take screen shots of UNIT 13.
  • CJ Heine for providing me with an image I was missing from UNIT 13.
  • Google for providing free fonts and for keeping YouTube video hosting free.
    (This site uses the Open Sans font from Google, which was created by Steve Matteson.)
  • Mark Myers for writing A Smarter Way to Learn jQuery.
    This book and its exercises really taught me jQuery. You should buy it!
  • David Sawyer McFarland for CSS 3 the missing manual.
    This book definitely helped get me going with CSS. He also gives a very important piece of advice for web design: Mockup your pages in an art program or on paper first!
  • Jon Duckett for JavaScript & jQuery.
    I like the style of this book, but I just didn't understand jQuery even after reading it twice. It is a great reference once you have gone through A Smarter Way to Learn jQuery and has some good example code. I borrowed the tab selection code and a few elements of the modal window code from this book.
  • This website for giving me a good visual example of media queries.
  • elstcb's code on this site for teaching me how to measure without scrollbars.
  • These sites gave me some good ideas when I removed YouTube embeds, but of course, I had to do it my way!
    http://www.skipser.com/test/googlecode/gplus-youtubeembed/test.html
    http://www.labnol.org/internet/light-youtube-embeds/27941/
  • Nick Craver's answer to the question on this Stack Overflow page helped me finally get rid of the horrible YouTube "white flash".
  • This site has a great discussion on fonts and sizing.
  • I got a pretty good best case mobile device detector from this site.
  • Paulie D's advice on transistions from a post on CSS Tricks.
  • kapa's answer to this Stack Overflow page was great as I hadn't done a lot of form based HTML and needed to know why my buttons were not working.