simon started his professional web development in 2000 as a web master and developer for the uk based website gameplay, where he was instrumental in creating file monster, a large games related file download site. in 2001 he left to attend the university of bath. whilst studying, he worked part-time for incutio where he developed the incutio xml-rpc library, a popular xml-rpc library for php (used in wordpress and drupal). during this time simon started his web development blog. in developing the software for his blog, simon built one of the first implementations of pingback. through his blog he was an early adopter and evangelist of openid.