About Rob Tomlinson | Rob Tomlinson

This website is free-to-view, advert-free, cookie-free, algorithm-free, AI-free, hate-free and (mostly) rant-free - all without you being the product. It is also a site that has a foot in two camps. The first is software and website design, which the site has been steeped in since I started it in 1999 as my freelancer’s shop window. Following behind is a broadening range of interests that time gifts me the ability to pursue. These latter include books, art, buildings and our precious and precarious natural world. Photographs lend support where appropriate. This second batch of writing has now become the site’s principal preoccupation.

The site has broadened and gained bulk as this journey has runs its course and I am surprised by and grateful to those who have encountered my various posts and made contact. Those who know me as a coder know also that I have done time as an English teacher, a passion that predated all the hurly-burly of arrays and variables. I make no excuse for the circularity of things in now investing more time in natural than in machine languages. I recommend this progression to anyone who, like me, has designed and developed software systems.

freelance software/web developer since 1994 - originally in Brighton - relational databases, multimedia systems elearning and consumer applications (in Asymetrix ToolBook and VB.NET), websites and CMS websites
English teacher for 17 years (in London and East Sussex, UK): English, English as a foreign language, remediating specific language-learning difficulties (dyslexia)
Head of English in a special school (dyslexia)
graduate of education (University of Southampton) and post-grad study (University of London) in the psychology of human information-processing

France between 1998 and 2016; software and website development; residential English teaching courses (see our archived blog posts)
restorer of two traditional French farmhouses; custodian and guardian of their hedgerows, trees and surrounding meadows; curator of oak beams; weekend artisan in lime render and terracotta tiles

using the Drupal and Backdrop content-management systems
clarity, exactitude and the power of words to inform, persuade, delight and give pleasure - once an English teacher, always an English teacher?
literature, not least because it provides endless examples of personal development
surveying and photographing flora and fauna in a local, one-acre cemetery, amounting to more than 620 species (as of December 2023), viewable here

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The site logo

Written - and printed - English contains more information than we need. Because the upper portion of words is more distinctive than the lower portion, we can read incomplete text when we see only this upper portion. Our brains complete the missing information for us.

You can see this for yourself in this site’s upper logo, which is so much easier to decode than is the text of the logo at the foot of the page.

In a broader sense, this is how our brains work at every level of the reading process. Given enough clues, we can fill in the gaps, which explains why brevity is a highly-prized skill. As Pascal is reputed to have said, “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”. (Attribution for this aphorism is discussed well here.)