I can already tell you're going to be epic as far as a friend and as a person who actually knows what they're doing with programming! I'm really happy that I came on this site now!
I did go to college and learned very little about web development (my classes were more focused on VB.NET and C/C++, and I didn't learn too much with either). I've had experience with setting up quite a few PHP-based forums (
http://forum.dragonglit.ch/viewtopic...573a54cfb3612d for reference), though I've also installed Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and quite a few others, even without using Softaculous. I had my own forums when I was a freshman in high school. I used an odd form of IRC when my oldest brother got WebTV when I was in the 7th grade, and that got me interested in IRC when my family got an actual computer (I'm also thinking of getting an IRC channel but that's going to be in the future).
I was always interested in programming, but it was more of a hobby type of thing. Which is why I didn't do so well in college, to the point I just changed my major looking for something easy but still fulfilling. Didn't find much, and dropped out after four years, with some knowledge of things that were quite interested. During the time, I was also a moderator for DragonAdopters, and ran their IRC channel. I had a few people on my staff, and worked my way up to moderating the forums, though I really just preferred working on things relating to the IRC channel at the time (that was so much easier than anything I was doing in college).
Most things for programming, I was self-taught (I did learn a few things about HTML in college, but it was trivial since I'd learned CSS due to deviantART's journal system). What I've learned, I've still not quite mastered, however. I can do edits in PHP, but not write my own code. Though that part comes with managing my own installations of things for at least 6 years. I was more of a hobbyist tinkerer, until now. Now I've actually started shelling out money for some of the things I'm trying to get set up (I got three domain names and decent hosting for a year, so...ya...X3).
Also, I do love your style of drawing! I'd love to see what you could do for a dragon with a little drawing practice and a lot of spare time! And if there's anything you want set up for your site, I could try to give you a hand (I'm not great at coding, but I know my way around cPanel and MySQL databases) :3 I'm usually reachable by Twitter or through a text, though I also have Skype, but I can't use it too much because it kills my internet (I'm on 3G for home internet, and I'm constantly throttled. I'm apparently in the top 5% of highest usage X3)
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