Welcome

This site has been created as a way for me to keep track of my projects, tidbits, fixes, and other bits of information I have found useful over time. The navigaion on the left walks the tree from the root downwards, and the location bar at the top can be used for moving up the tree again. The site is powered by Blosxom, a rather elegant Perl based blog software that is very configurable. It runs on a FreeBSD box, and it designed to be as simple as possible and standards compliant. As a result, this site does not use cookies or javascript, making it work on pretty much any type of device that follows web-standards.

Any news/updates will be posted on this page below.

Updates

January 2024: Site back on-line

Happy new year! After a hiatus of over 10 years, I have brought this site back online, completely re-written. It didn't feel like 10 years have passed, but life really gets busy the older you get. Only when the Covid lockdowns occured did I actually have enough time free time after work for personal projects, during which I decided it would be nice to bring the site back.

The old CMS is gone. Back in the early 2000s the concept of a CMS was new and money could be made offering it to others. To put it into perspective. At the time a "web designer" could charge £500 per "HTML page update", it was the closest I had seen to average people being able to print money. Needless to say with that that kind of charge per update of a web page, you could sell a "Content Management System" (CMS) for good money. People would pay a lump sum so they can update their own web pages. So as part of a web design company I wrote a CMS which would be offered to clients, and this website was my main testing ground for new CMS developments and debugging before it went into production.

Since then however, website builders and open source blogging software like wordpress replaced custom CMSes so there is not much point in keeping a proprietery system running, especially as I was the only one still using it. Plus it was far more powerful and complex than I needed it to be. For example, having a full blown WYSIWYG editor with image upload and insertion was fine for customers, but I preferred writing in HTML so it was overcomplicated for my needs.

So in its place is Blosxom as mentioned above, its flexibility allowing me to quite radically alter the way it works using plugins, while building on an existing stable base. As was the case with my previous site design, this theme is written to work on all standards-compliant browsers. This time I went for even more minimalism, to maximise the amount of space available for the articles themselves.

A lot of the original articles are 10+ years old, and in a different format to the current system. As such it will take time to review and port them across. Most likely only those articles that were complete will be ported over.

Beyond that, I will be writing new articles based on projects and useful bits of information that I make use of today.As I have changed the backend, the old URLs that are posted in links across the web no longer work. In such a case best option is to look on the navigation bar on the left to see if the article is available.