The developer at
But my first love is pottery
https://tonyhansen.com/pottery
Message me at Digitalfire.com or follow me at
Computer Programming, Web Development and Media
Tony Hansen is the owner of Digitalfire Corporation, a technician at Plainsman Clays, a potter and product developer and internationally known web designer and programmer, graphic artist, author, educator and dreamer.
- Tony has been a web developer/programmer since 1995, specializing in minimalist solutions that run secure and fast. He was among the first in North America to sell online.
- Tony was an early adopter of computer graphics and publishing software (bit image and vector), self-publishing PDF software manuals and books by the late 1980s.
- His Insight desktop glaze chemistry software has run cross-platform since the late 1990s.
- He embraced the movement away from desktop and spreadsheets towards the cloud and databases (and their programming languages) during the 1990s and was an early adopter of the Linux OS servers and networks.
- Tony began authoring digitalfire.com by the late 1990s (traditional ceramics encyclopedia).
- Tony created insight-live.com as the first ceramics-targeted LIMS (laboratory information management system), transitioning the company to a virtual MSP. It is the custodian of lab and testing data for thousands of individuals, schools and companies. The company has developed extensive hands-on cyber-security know-how and has successfully protected customer data.
- Tony primarily identifies as a potter, thousands of images of his ware can be found at digitalfire.com, plainsmanclays.com, in Google searches and at https://tonyhansen.com/pottery.
- Tony is on the leading edge of 3D design and 3D printing as they pertain to making molds, cutters, tools, templates, etc for ceramics. His Fusion 360 tutorials are widely used in education.
- Tony is an early adopter of AI tools, methods and programming toolkits - finding ever more ways to incorporate them into ceramics.
Ceramic Technology
- He has been developing and perfecting clay body, porcelain and glaze formulation and testing methods since the late 1970s.
- Tony's methods, software and online or published reference materials are employed widely by technicians and supply companies to formulate and maintain their glazes, engobes, underglazes and clay bodies.
- Tony's presentation at the conference of the American Ceramic Society in Indianapolis in 1998 introduced engineers and scientists to the "Internet".
- He has consulted for hundreds of companies and artists on a wide range of ceramic fabrication techniques, glaze and body formulation, especially the application of chemistry to understanding glazes.
- Tony's glaze and porcelain recipes are used and adjusted throughout the world (and are documented thoroughly at digitalfire).
- His online 4000-page ceramic materials is the top material technical information destination for traditional ceramics, most pages Google-place above those of the material suppliers.
- Tony's Digitalfire Insight software has been used to make everything from spark plugs to refractories, light bulbs to ceramic tile, frits and glazes to sinks and toilets, electrical insulators to fine china and tableware.
- Tony's DOS 4Sight Ceramic Database of the 1990s grew into Insight-Live, the main LIMS used today. Companies trust it with the privacy and integrity of their data (including many Plainsman competitors and suppliers).
Pottery
Since the first time he saw someone making a piece on the potters wheel, Tony Hansen has been captivated by ceramics. Since 1973 he has worked closely with Plainsman Clays, a miner and manufacturer of clay materials and bodies. His intensive formulation, testing and lab quality control work there has been a primary catalyst for the development of all his ceramic-related products. Tony is also an accomplished potter since the early 1970s during which time Luke Lindoe, founder of Plainsman Clays, personally tutored him to carry on the ideal of developing local clay resources and leveraging local ceramic production know-how (from companies like Medalta Potteries, I-XL Industries and Hycroft China). Tony makes many types of functional and decorative stoneware, porcelain and earthenware. He is a champion of DIY (in a pottery world becoming increasing distant from basic knowledge).
Ceramic Industry Connections
Tony Hansen is well-traveled in the ceramic industry and has attended, exhibited and lectured at many international events. He has authored dozens of technical ceramic articles in magazines around the world, appears in many ceramic textbooks and has personally exhibited at many international trade shows. He has steadily built a large circle of thousands of key contacts in many organizations and sectors of the ceramic industry and is well-positioned to introduce web technologies that will be accepted and adopted.
Plainsman Clays
The company has up to ten thousand customers who use its clay bodies in school, hobby, pottery and manufacturing. Tony has maintained connection with thousands through CRM efforts at Plainsman, many social media platforms tied to blogs on the home pages and vendor-customer relationships at Digitalfire and Insight-live. He actively does product development, troubleshooting and relentless testing of new recipes and ways of using native materials. As a teen, he worked on the construction of the plant (contracted by his father).
Medalta Potteries
Tony has a good understanding of the history of the company and contemporary manufacturers. He has worked on documentation efforts and making them available to the public. He is the digital custodian of the life's work of Ron Getty, having worked with him to publish key books and newsletters celebrating the history of the company and the local ceramic production industry. He is currently designing molds using 3D printing technology to make replicas of popular Medalta products.
How Insight Software Was Born
In 1978, Tony Hansen, the young plant technician and budding potter at Plainsman Clays, began development of INSIGHT. This was shortly after the introduction of the first personal computers by companies like Altair, Apple and Tandy. The first commercial version of INSIGHT ran on the Tandy Model III and featured separate recipe and formula frames (the term 'window' was not yet conceived). He subsequently ported it to the first commonly available laptop computer, the Tandy Model 100. The IBM PC was introduced in 1982 and INSIGHT was running on it by 1983. Shortly after that he got INSIGHT running on the first Macintosh 128K. Windows and more Macintosh friendly versions followed in the early nineties. Tony Hansen continues to be the prime developer of INSIGHT. He introduced FORESIGHT in 1990 as the first fully relational recipe, ceramic calculation and physical test record keeping system, it is still used by many companies today (some have hundreds of thousands of tests in their databases). INSIGHT is the international standard by which others are measured. Full-page ads for INSIGHT first appeared in Ceramics Monthly magazine in the mid-80s. The first INSIGHT BBS went online (via dialup) in 1992, and the first website in 1995 (the year after the HTML internet was born).
He is a Dreamer!
Despite many pressures to pursue other much more profitable ventures, Tony has always stuck to his first love, pottery and ceramics. His head really is 'in the clouds' in the sense that "cloud server" technology has brought it all together in the 2020s. The decades have required a lot of tenacity to 'hang on' until the ceramic world fully appreciates the value of DIY and data in ceramics.
