This page is an experiment: to lay out links to the majority of the content added to the site since it took this format and to do so on one page. Content has been grouped, styled and highlighted in pursuit of improved readability.

The surprise of doing an audit such as this is that it encourages one to adopt something of a curator’s perspective - tweaking the display to reveal patterns and themes. (Did I mention anything about icebergs?)

Main content pages

7
a continuing journey of diverging interests

pages of this site (as distinct from other types of content) are listed here; about the same quantity again was culled in a radical pruning several years back.

Blog posts

34

blog posts are available here. These are on a broad range of topics - mostly about web design and development - but off-topic posts are scattered about.

Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert

Reader View

Extinct & Endangered

Website accessibility

Akhmatova, Yevtushenko and Putin

Flowers in a glass vase

Samuel Beckett's hands

Website building resources

Albertinelli's The Creation and Fall of Man

Targeting a menu link from two levels down

Truth sidelined by tribal epistemology

Strengthening your passwords

Mapping in Backdrop CMS

Help is at hand

Ten steps to greening your website

Drupal version 8: loyalty or farewell?

Can a web page have too much white space?

No Man is an Island

Adding a scroll indicator

Viral content and long term lift - an example

Nature therapy and VE Day

Flash flushed

Pixel squeezing with JPEGmini

Know your tables

Mapping your business

The BBC Sounds app and the onTabletFling() event

The chestnut leaf breakout

Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery

La garde-robe

Farewell Drupal 8. Hello Backdrop CMS

Surrounded by orchids

Field can contain HTML

Meet the Soays

Good reading

Reading is a silver spoon you can’t be born with. For some, the ability never develops or does so only through struggle. It’s only natural then to share the fruits of reading fluency freely and with passion. It’s what bookworms - and English teachers, practising or retired - do.

A few of these posts are shamefully short whilst others have veered towards being essays. You have been warned! Get in touch if you think I’ve misread - or even missed - something.

The Peregrine

J. A. Baker

Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White

Foolproof - Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity

Sander van der Linden

Voss

Patrick White

Endless Forms - The Secret World of Wasps

Seirian Sumner

The Tree of Man

Patrick White

Words Onscreen - the Fate of Reading in a Digital World

Naomi S. Baron

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

Why Climate Breakdown Matters

Rupert Read

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Road to Oxiana

Robert Byron

Underland

Robert Macfarlane

Reclaiming Conversation - The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Sherry Turkle

The Lives of the Surrealists

Desmond Morris

Regenesis

George Monbiot

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett

Ulysses

James Joyce

How It Is

Samuel Beckett

Watt

Samuel Beckett

How Civil Wars Start And How to Stop Them

Barbara F. Walter

Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm

Isabella Tree

Murphy

Samuel Beckett

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking

Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse

Dave Goulson

Reader, Come Home - the Reading Brain in a Digital World

Maryanne Wolf

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery

Proust and the Squid - the Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf

We are Bellingcat

Eliot Higgins

Shorelands Summer Diary

C.F. Tunnicliffe

Entangled Life

Merlin Sheldrake

Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy

Michael McCarthy

The Eye of the Storm

Patrick White

The Captain and the Glory

Dave Eggers

The Old Ways

Robert Macfarlane

The Cockroach

Ian McEwan

The Clock of the Long Now - time and responsibility

Stewart Brand

The Vivisector

Patrick White

In The Rainforest

Catherine Caufield

The Solid Mandala

Patrick White

Places

54

places show up here. Each has left a mark sufficient to prompt a post. Some of these (from 2012 — 2015) originate from our old teaching website in France (with its less complicated language). Some of these posts are vehicles for pixels, some for words; some posts have both working in harmony.

Wells Cathedral's Chapter House steps

House for an Art Lover

The Cosmic House

The Hill House

The Church of St. Thomas Becket, Fairfield

Lacock Abbey

The Collector Earl’s Garden

Kew Gardens and the Temperate House

The Spanish Chestnut Avenue

The Kintyre peninsula

Old Soar Manor

The Kintyre shoreline

Carlyle's House

The Glasgow School of Art 2018

Penshurst Place

Great Chalfield Manor

The Queen's House Greenwich

The Giant's Causeway

Claydon House

Downhill Demesne and Mussenden Temple

The Old Royal Naval College's Painted Hall

Belfast's Murals and Peace Walls

Oxburgh Hall

Rathlin Island

Chastleton House

Lancing College Chapel

Broughton Castle

Casa Batlló, Barcelona

The Isle of Coll

Casa Milà, "La Pedrera", Barcelona

Petworth House

La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Ightham Mote

The dance in moonlight

The i360, Brighton

Standen House

Lincoln Cathedral

Montacute House

Hardwick Hall

Barrington Court

Stokesay Castle

East Coker

Sezincote

Auch cathedral

St Botolph's Church, Hardham

Trapeharde's wheel of time

Haddon Hall

Lewes Crescent

St. Celynin's Church at Llangelynnin

The Maquis de Meilhan

Parham House

Bostah Iron Age Village

The Uig Sands Chessmen

The Glasgow School of Art

Website development and design reading list

48

volumes do indeed sit on my shelves and I have read them all - bar the odd chapter here or there. They have helped me to stay out of the classroom and have nourished me immeasurably. I’ve not used a star system to set one above another, but my comments alongside each may help perform that function. Some of these books I find - and still find - to be quite simply invaluable.

Sustainable Web Design

Tom Greenwood; A Book Apart, 2021

Flexible Typesetting

Tim Brown; A Book Apart, 2018

Accessibility for Everyone

Laura Kalbag; A Book Apart, 2017

The New CSS Layout

Rachel Andrew; A Book Apart, 2017

Web Typography

Richard Rutter; Ampersand Type, 2017

Design for Real Life

Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher; A Book Apart, 2016

Beginning Backdrop CMS

Todd Tomlinson; Apress, 2016

Pricing Design

Dan Mall; A Book Apart, 2016

Designing for Touch

Josh Clark; A Book Apart, 2015

Migrating from Drupal to Backdrop

Todd Tomlinson; Apress, 2015

Responsible Responsive Design

Scott Jehl; A Book Apart, 2014

On Web Typography

Jason Santa Maria; A Book Apart, 2014

You're My Favorite Client

Mike Monteiro; A Book Apart, 2014

Drupal Search Engine Optimization

Ric Shreves; Packt Publishing, 2012

Content Strategy for Mobile

Karen McGrane; A Book Apart, 2012

Designing for Emotion

Aarron Walter; A Book Apart, 2011

Responsive Web Design

Ethan Marcotte; A Book Apart, 2011

The Elements of Content Strategy

Erin Kissane; A Book Apart, 2011

Introducing HTML5

Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp; New Riders, 2011

Stunning CSS3 - a project-based guide to the latest in CSS

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater; New Riders, 2011

Drupal 6 Attachment Views

J. Ayen Green; Packt Publishing, 2010

Drupal 6 Panels Cookbook

Bhavin (Vin) Patel, Packt Publishing, 2010

Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x

George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras; Packt Publishing, 2010

Drupal 6 Performance Tips

Trevor James and T.J. Holowaychuk; Packt Publishing, 2010

Cognitive Surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age

Clay Shirky; The Penguin Press, New York, 2010

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization

Ben Finklea; Packt Publishing, 2009

Pro Drupal Development - 2nd edition

John K. VanDyk; Apress, 2008

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6

David Mercer; Packt Publishing, 2008

Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Wiliams; Apress, 2008

Designing with Web Standards - 2nd edition

Jeffrey Zeldman; New Riders, 2007

About Face 3 - the essentials of interaction design

Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and David Cronin; Wiley Publishing, 2007

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd edition

Eric A. Meyer; O'Reilly, 2006

Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time

Maria Veloso; Amacom, a division of American Management Association, 2005

The Zen of CSS Design - visual enlightenment for the web

Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag; Peachpit Press, 2005

The Elements of User Experience - user-centered design for the web

Jesse James Garrett; New Riders Publishing, 2003

Visual Interface Design for Windows

Virginia Howlett; John Wiley Sons, 1996

The Elements of Typographic Style, second edition

Robert Bringhurst; Hartlet & Marks, 1996

The Media Equation

Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass; Cambridge University Press, 1996

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman; Currency Doubleday, 1990

French archive posts

30

posts about living and teaching in rural France gather a little bit of virtual dust here. From 2010 onwards, until we returned to England in 2016, we enjoyed working with French adults and youngsters who came to stay with us at our house in the Gers to work on their English. With both of us being qualified teachers, we like to think that we made something of an impact.

This experience was immensely rewarding for Jane and I, not least because it gave us insight into the value various French people placed upon learning English. We also made many friends, some of whom we continue to see even though we now no longer live in France.

We advertised the business through our own website, sejour-anglais.com, now no longer live. We also developed a collection of blog posts which we hoped would allow potential clients to get a feel for what it might be like staying with us.

In my capacity as a website designer, this part of the business had its own appeal as I could see how powerful an informal blog can be when attached to the more formal pages of a business website. Sometimes these English language blog pages would rank on page one of Google France search results, an unintended consequence of using HTML without tricks or paid-for advertising.

For sentimental reasons, a selection of these French-based blog posts has found a final resting place in this section of the site.

The Booth Museum of Natural History

Brighton's Royal Pavilion

Arundel Castle

Grasses, names and history

Footprints from the past

Markings in wood

Albert and the miniscule worlds

A van with a difference

An explosion of colour in Auch

Black, yellow and wonderful

A flame-proof amphibian

The European tree frog

Asparagus - the king of vegetables

The golden lady in our kitchen

Crossing the Tarn in style

Competition - caption for cat photos

Le Musée des Jacobins

In the footsteps of d'Artagnan

What course do we use?

Spring has arrived

Keeping an eye out for birds

Upside-down cake

Curry - a favourite in England

Googling

Pronouncing words that end in 's'

English adjective order

The Bassoues donjon

Software development archive

20

software projects cling on tenaciously here. This stuff was done prior to my designing and building websites, enabling me to learn how to listen to clients and to design systems that responded to their detailed requirements. The following applications are software projects (not website projects) that demonstrate some of these qualities. Written in either VB.NET or ToolBook Asymetrix/Click2Learn ToolBook Developer (the first Windows-based multimedia software authoring system) they were - with one exception - front-ends to databases. The majority of them were eLearning or course-management applications.

Welcome to the pre-internet museum!